Remember these? 2 1/4″ film developing reels. How many million times did I load these with Plus X film after a shoot. How many hundreds of times did I ruin a few frames because the film end stuck to the layer below? Guilty! After “it was all over,” the film era that is, I used pinhole to demonstrate the fundamentals of photography to several generations of students. A lot of the old gear made good subjects. The old was useful to the new. Made sense. Like a circle completed. They loved it. I loved that they loved it. Like a morning mist those times were gone in a flash. That’s one of the reasons we do photography, right? To hold onto what is gone. Yeah!
’48 Chrysler, El Paso, Texas, 2022, photograph by Bruce Berman
Photograph and rumination by Bruce Berman
I’m out of words. Taught photography for 25 years. F-stops, shutter speeds, composition, GET CLOSER!, on and on and on. In the beginning there was just photography and me. Burned out? Talked out? In the end, what is there to say? The world is LIGHT. Photography is Light-writing (Greek). Actually light-noticing, good and bad. And commitment to doing it. Pretending it can be taught is a wink. If you really have no heart for it and realize the part about sweating to get it (which is universal to all pursuits), why botha. And then there is love. The love you feel when it’s good. The love you get from others who felt what and how you saw something. The love you can give by giving your heart in the form of that image, whether it’s a print (especially if it’s a print), on a monitor or I don’t know what else. There I go again. Words. Just can’t! Do you love this image?
Text by Bruce Berman Photograph by Alvino Viscaino
Long talk with my sister. For better or worse we’ve been rappin’ for all my years and she was rappin’ for four and a half years before I ever hit this planet. We now share our challenges of aging. Health issues are starting to dominate our conversations, both ways. We share our hard-earned wisdom. We try to encourage each other in the ways we always have: she tells me hard truths that I have always whimpily avoided (chronic head-in-sand), I offer my optimism and comedy, which she never had the luxury of getting. We don’t mention our politics. Some minefields aren’t survivable. We don’t dare touch religion (those two being which is exactly what our parents cautioned us not do), we have a bond because we’re the last two from our family, the last two from an era now long gone, a time when America meant neighborhood loyalty, no reference points for all the dividing wedges that now control our country–and us-when she was “the boss,” and I was the tag-along little brother and our main concern was what was going to be the next fun. Our youth is now a mist harder and harder to remember or to discuss, it is all behind, and what’s ahead is a bit stress-inducing. We rap on.
Good ole days… when every inch wasn’t being developed. It’s now a time of emptiness and greed and of “not enough of too much.” It’s too much. There was a time of “Not enough was more than enough.” It looked better. Period.
Lerdo is a street of dreams and fancy. It’s the main street in old Juárez where people go for their Quinciñera gowns, or wedding dresses or tuxedos or custom made anythings. On any Saturday, families come there, and order clothes for whichever ceremony one of their members are about to attend. Packs of rovers, seeking their fantasies. It’s lovely.
All the signs are gone, or gone to a hipster bar somewhere in America. The Funk is sanitized. Hosiery bar? Really? How un Gucci. For me that era was a treasure chest waiting for me to open it and when I did… TREASURE! You got anything to compare to this, now? Somehow the Walmart Women’s section just doesn’t have the juice. Is there anywhere on this planet now that isn’t manufactured? I think there is. Not sharing. Going. My soul needs authenticity. I guess everyone’s does. We’re on our own.
Railyard into Auschwitz-BirkenauIncineration ovens, worked 24 hours a dayGas Chamber (Incoming victims told it was a shower), door for removing bodiesElectrified fenceLatrine. Inmates only allowed two visits/dayGrandmother’s name in the book of the deadDouble electrified fence and inmate barracks
Editor’s Note: Walter Chayes is a photographer, financial consultant, a bicyclist and a humanitarian. He –and his brother– started in photography in their teens in New York City. Walter’s work is known for capturing important moments and for its strong graphic content. In this body of work, a work of the heart, Walter visits the epicenter of the Holocaust and, in essence, visits the scene of his Grandparents’ last days. This is difficult work to do. It was difficult work to edit. The message of the work is, “Never Forget/Never Again.” Bruce Berman, Editor DocumentaryShooters.com
Text and Photographs by Walter Chayes
Despite being an American-born Jew whose parents narrowly escaped the Holocaust, there was always a certain remoteness, an intangibility, when I read of the horrors of the concentration camps. How could a (lower) middle-class New Yorker, educated in the 20th Century identify with the thought of gassing 20,000 human beings, men, women and children in a single week…wiping out six million innocent people in the German’s attempt to eradicate Judaism? How could I feel the horrors that my grandparents felt as they were led into the gas chambers of Auschwitz? As an early member, and past President of the El Paso Holocaust Museum, I jumped on the opportunity to join a Poland-Israel trip jointly organized by our Museum and the local synagogues in June of this year. In preparation for my trip I read many books on the history of the Holocaust, Eli Wiesel, Viktor Frankl and Primo Levy were among the most eloquent historians that told of their suffering. But I also read more objective historical books on the Holocaust…the history leading up to the horrific events, the ease with which dormant anti-semitism became a dominant force in German life. I also read psychological analyses of the victims…why didn’t they leave when they had the chance, why didn’t they fight back when faced with certain death, and so on.
Smoking Man, diner at State and Ohio Streets, Chicago, 1971
Photograph and Text by Bruce Berman
This was the very beginning of my career, when I first realized what I wanted to be … a photographer. Not much has changed since then. This is exactly the kind of photograph I like to make, the kind of experience I like to have. Me on the prowl, encountering a person on the fringe, direct eye contact. The only thing I do now that I did not do then is to get more info about a person, really get to know them. At that time, and for many many years afterwards, I was just satisfied with getting the photograph. As time has gone on I now realize that that is incomplete. It’s the photograph and the text that matter, so that the person photographed is honored, not just used. Maybe that reflects aging, learning the world is not all about me but about me being in the world, about respect for others, maybe just about being a real documentary photographer. So, here I am, 42 years later and I don’t know who he is, where he was from, what the name of the diner was, what he did for a living, exactly when the date was, etc., i.e., the 5Ws that any journalist knows are essential. A detail I never noticed before, is his shoes. Believe it or not they are meaningful to me. In my old south side neighborhood, these are the kind of shoes we’d buy every few years. They were our main shoes (except for dress shoes). This man’s are the primos, the better ones, because they have finished leather. Ours were the exact same 10 lace model but a cheaper brand, and the leather on those was called “rough out.” Why am I talking about shoes?
Don’t know who shot it, don’t know if the red is real or not, just don’t know anything except maybe it’s one of the all-time cool images. And it makes me wonder, what’s as cool as this these days? A rocker on stage screaming and sweating? I don’t think so. It was something about those suits and those horns and those clubs… something about knowing everything about everything – Google-something about it was not manufactured it was just happenin’. it was just cool.
Rent ur _________?, El Paso, Texas, March 5, 2023 by Bruce Berman
For staff photographers working in the newspaper world, this kind of photo used to be called an “Enterprise Photo,” meaning the photographer, driving around, usually from assignment to assignment would be on the alert for feature photos that his/her editor might use to spice up the next paper’s edition … maybe. Old habits die hard. So, here’s today’s enterprise photo.
Right there, right in La Mesa, New Mexico, four days ago, is the lesson on why we do DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY! My documentary photography class at New Mexico State University (NMSU) has been doing a project for the past twelve years, the Small Village New Mexico project (SVNM), documenting the small villages in southern New Mexico. One of the students’ favorites towns is La Mesa. Probably because there has been one guy, Joe Mees, who rebuilds cars and Harleys, and has always been very welcoming to the students. It doesn’t hurt that he looks very cool! Last Thursday, we met Tim Mees, Joe’s son.. He told us of that “Joe has been bed-ridden for about a year.”
Never too young, I guess. We had ONE pair of gloves when I was a kid. I got the left-handed one and my day had the other. He had a robust punch. Ironically, his name was Punch. LOL!
This is the first Pinhole I ever made in summer 1971. After three yeqars of shooting editorial work, riots, demonstrations, poverty and pissed off people, I needed to stop. I packed my Canon cameras up and was wondering what to do. Eventually, I stumbled upon a small book at a bookstore called The Hole Thing by Jim Schull. I made the first camera with an old GE light bulb box, tinfoil and a #12 sewing needle and cut up a sheet of Kodak G #2 printing paper. This is the first one. No matter how far or wide I have gone for the past 52 years, I always return to Pinhole, which always reminds of how simple and yet unbelievably miraculous is the photographic process. And, how fun it is. And it reminds me not to forget the magic of the “hole thing.”
Montana Street rear window, Chicago, 1971 by Bruce Berman
Got trucks on my mind. By buddy Gary drives them (1 million miles plus). I live with them every week in my 100 mile r/t on I-10 to New Mexico (and back to Texas). I totally flipped out when the Canadian truckers went all wild and barreled down onto to the Ottawa capitol. I live over a truck yard three blocks from the border to México. They’re massive, powerful, essential and cool. Period.
The power of unintended consequences. Inge Morath, an early chosen photographer at Magnum, first became interested in Art at the Nazi’ exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) in Munich in July 1937. The exhibit was meant to be a disparagement of “modern art,” and was championed and attended by Hitler and other Nazi Party luminaries. For some the consequence was the oppoosite of their intentions. One of those was the young Inge Morath, a fourteen year old Austrian girl. It was her first encounter with a art and as opposed to being opposed to the art she encountered, she loved and in particular the art of German artist Franz Marc‘s Blue Horse.
Inge Morath was born in Graz, Austria, in 1923. After studying languages in Berlin, she became a translator, then a journalist and the Austrian editor for Heute, an Information Service Branch publication based in Munich. All her life Morath would remain a prolific diarist and letter-writer, retaining a dual gift for words and pictures that made her unusual among her colleagues. Morath was invited to join Magnum photo agency in 1953 at the invitation of reknowned photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson. She married playwright Arthur Miller in 1962 and remained his wife until her passing in 2002.
On November 3 at Mesilla Plaza in front of San Albino’s Basilica, the Journalism 320 (Photojournalism) class from New Mexico State University (NMSU) ran into a movie production scene being produced by the Creative Media Institute (CMI) department, which is a film-making department at NMSU. It was the last day of shooting on an independent film that began weeks before. The initial filming started in in Los Angeles.
Lightning may not strike twice in the same place but sometimes it comes close. In 1980, the day after I returned from an extended stay in NYC, I went to Juárez the next morning and by the time I got to the area of the cathedral, I was pooped. Sat down on a bench. I saw the turquoise wall, lifted the camera and the Vaquero walked by. One snap. Then it was gone. Today, knees hurting, just voted in the Segundo Barrio for the upcoming 2022 election, I pulled my car over, pondering an upcoming surgery, a little bummed, and at this incredible pink/red wall. There isn’t a lot of color left in la frontera. It’s become a kind of beige/gray landscape. I went to put my camera from its accustomed place on my lap onto the passenger seat. Just then, from around the corner this guy came cruising through. In a millisecond I told myself I’d miss but in the next millisecond lifted the camera -didn’t even have time to look through the viewfinder.- and plowed ahead. Snap. One shot. No “redo” possible. And, I just hoped. The monitor of the camera isn’t a really good proof, so I’d have to wait to get to my laptop. Forty two years later, since the “Vaquero with a Cigarette,” there was a version of same idea. Different times, yes. Waning color, yes. No more vaqueros (haven’t seen any). But here it is again, a repeat, the “Guy with a Smoke.” A lot has changed but, forty two years later, there’s some things that are almost the same. In fact, we’re still “not in Kansasanymore,” eh? The lightning came twice.
Whether you play guitar, do not play guitar, have no interest in playing guitar or don’t get enough sleep because you can’t stop playing the guitar, this is one of the most soothing videos we have ever seen. It’s about more than the guitar. Craftsmanship still exists. Everything is gone if it doesn’t. And there is nothing that should be thrown away except from our petroleum-based, plastic mess that our “stuff” is now mostly made of. Watch as he repairs and brings this back to life -for another 100 years?- without ruining its acquired character. In a throw-away world there is hope for a quality existence.
Editor’s Note by Bruce Berman How could you even describe how beautiful this car is. Every once in awhile you just have to go silent, let your mouth hang open and just say… Wow! At the end of the article… check the price. DEAL! ______________________________________________________________________________
Without a doubt one of the most beautiful cars ever made, the Talbot-Lago Teardrop Coupé was designed by Giuseppe Figoni, one of the greatest French coachbuilders before World War II. The sheer definition of Art-Deco, the T-150C SS was nicknamed Goutte d’Eau (teardrop) because of its round shape and sensual curves. Not just a pretty car, though, as the Talbots of the era won many races, including the French Grand Prix of 1937. A stock Talbot Teardrop even competed at the 1938 24 of Le Mans race, placing third overall. You can auction one of these beauties at around $4,000,000.
School girl escaping from photographer, Hatch, New Mexico, 2021
Editorial and Photograph by Bruce Berman
It’s not the era that was. People no longer are curious when they see a photographer, they’re nervous. “What do you want? Are these going to end up on the web (yes)?” “Do you work for the government (immigration for instance)?” No. “I don’t like this!” Or worse! “Give me that camera.” If you grew up in the era of Vivian Maier (I was a little afterwards)… if Vivian Maier were alive today… she’d probably be shooting flowers. Innocence lost. Of course the essential: question is -and always was- what right does a photographer have to just randomly take photographs of complete strangers and do what they will with them? I have never successfully been able to answer that question. I try to collaborate with people I photograph where consent is given. But I stray! Every once in awhile I -we?- just have to grab the moment. That moment is my escape, as well.
Every once in awhile, in my role as a teacher of photography, a student quietly comes up with an image that blows me away. This is one of them. So simple. So easy. It just has that “it” thing…. magic.
Photo and text by Bruce Berman (Disclaimer on this post’s title: Spare me, I don’t care!)
In the middle of chaos, glory! Three sisters. Puerto Ricaños. Read their personalities! It’s right there. Happy. Proud. Sexy. Confident. Even the waiter is having fun. A lazy wandering day, sitting at a street cafe in Little Italy at a tiny round table, slurping Italian Ices, with friends, Abraham Verghese and Irene Connelly, heading to the U.S. Open. Happy day for me, tennis, before the political deluge of now. Photography works in a lot of ways but the best of all is memory.
Editor’s Note: An account of the day of the Lynyrd Skynyrd plane crash after it went down and what happened afterwards. Amazing. Listen to 11:05 thru 18:25.
Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty A group of rebel women and girls practice their shooting skills during the Mexican Revolution. 1911.
I have always been -and still am- amazed by the Adelitas that followed and fought with the revolutionary army during the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920. Interesting that we’re having a controversy over including women in the draft. The Adelitas volunteered.
Things stick with you. Forever. Particularly bad things. No amount of money can undo things you did that you shouldn’t have. Maybe in heaven… Kozelek’s always been eclectic (and superb). This one is particularly touching.
Operating a hand drill at Vultee-Nashville, woman is working on a “Vengeance” dive bomber, Tennessee 1943 Feb., all photographs by Alfred T. Palmer/OWI (Office of War Information)
Poster using Alfred T. Palmer’s 4″ X 5″ color transparency Shot for the OWI, used by the U.S. Employment Service For more of Palmer’s work, click here.
Girl at Gee’s Bend, Alabama (April 1937) by Arthur Rothstein, Library of Congrss
Text by Bruce Berman, Site Editor
“You see the girl — that’s effect one. You see the ad [the blond woman] — that’s effect two. But the third effect is when you see both images together and recognize the irony.” — Arthur Rothstein on the photo
It’s a beautiful photograph, no doubt. Rule of thirds composition. Great light creating great texture. Juxtaposition of the printed rumpled paper against the real person, Black tones versus light tones, i.e., contrast. The slightly diagonal lines and the pattern they create. Textbook rules of composition. But, of overwhelming importance, of course, the implied comment and intention of the photograph. Arthur Rothstein understood and believed in the power of photography to make social commentary. Working for the United States government, Rothstein photographed Artelia Bendolph in Alabama, to illustrate the effects of the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenancy Act of 1937. Of course -and this is NEVER supposed to be asked when discussing the iconic FSA project- should someone working for the government EVER be allowed to use their words or photographs to “make social commentary?” Isn’t that the realm of commentators in the news industry, i.e., non tax paid?
The Small Village New Mexico project (SVNM) was created as a Documentary Photography teaching tool, for my advanced photojournalism class at New Mexico State University.
The Kodak Duaflex is a 620 roll film pseudo TLR made by Kodak in the US, Canada, and UK. The original versions were available from December 1947 – September 1950 in the US, and 1949-1955 in the UK; the Duaflex IV was finally discontinued in the US in March 1960. It was real. If film is still made it will shoot. It feels good in the hand and the eye. It is not plastic.
Text/Photography by Bruce Berman Music Video by Bob Dylan
The funk is almost gone. The generation that lived it is going down, too. The 1930s (like this truck), 40s, 50s, 60s and even 70s is just about disappeared (desesparado). I watch it go. I watch parts of me go with it. No energy actually vanishes. It reappears, new, in another form. Life ongoing… just not how we expected. Is that the lesson of history, of photography of things from the past, of this image, Funk #731? This truck could be rehabbed. Buffed up. Sprayed new. But it won’t be new. Glossier than it ever was. But it won’t be new. It could be stripped down to its individual pieces and bits, item by item, pump by pump, ball joint by ball joint, reassembled. But it won’t be new. Can I be?
The Atlantic Monthly just published an article about the FSA (Farm Security Administration) and how minority Americans (African-Americans and Latino Americans) were ignored by the FSA during its four year run. It’s title is: Whitewashing the Great Depression. It is factually misinforming. Four years ago I co-authored (with my colleague Dr. Mary Lamonica) an article titled, “The Photographer as Cultural Outsider.” It focused on Russell Lee and his 1949 project shot for George I. Sanchez who was the first Latino Dept. Head at UT-Austin and one of the early Civil Rights warriors in LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens). Sanchez had created The Study of the Spanish-Speaking People of Texas project. Lee, of course, was an FSA shooter of great renown and prestige (and later OWI/Office of War Information). He had settled after his WW 2 service in Austin, Texas, the same city as Sanchez’. Our article was a little more nuanced than the Atlantic piece and delved into the issue of cultural identity of the photographer (or writer or filmmaker) in shaping not only his/her viewpoint but how various ethnic subjects react to a photographer.
June 1938. Outskirts of El Paso, Texas. “Young Negro wife cooking breakfast. ‘Do you suppose I’d be out on the highway cooking my steak if I had it good at home?’ Occupations: hotel maid, cook, laundress.” Medium-format nitrate negative by Dorothea Lange for the FSA (Farm Security Administration).
William Klein is an American-born French photographer (b. 1928) and filmmaker noted for his ironic approach to both media and his extensive use of unusual photographic techniques in the context of photojournalism and fashion photography. He used telephoto lenses to shoot fashion before it became standard, he cranked his enlarger’s focusing knob back and forth to create a weird zoom look, he shot high fashion on the streets without permits and, most of all he always stayed rebellious, innovative and, well… different. He has lived in Paris since the 1960s and is still creating new work which is widely exhibited. Klein was a pioneer not only in fashion photography but in independent filmmaking and street photography and now, in his fusion of painting and photography. For an excellent insight into the great Klein, view the full length (58:43) video below. For a gallery of his still photography check out the link to the right under Great Photographers.
My father, Irving “Punch” Berman was born on Ellis Island in 1906. It was the day his parents -my grandparents- arrived in America. He was the first American in our family. He was grateful to be here. The documentation of “The Island” by Stephen Wilkes is documentary photography at its best: it preserves our memories and it stimulates inquiry. See Stephen’s work: https://stephenwilkes.com/fine-art/ellis-island/ Was this the exact room he was born in? Who knows? Was this the exact clinic? Yes. Was he an accidental American? Most definitely. The mystery in our family was, always, twofold: a) why did they let them in? My grandfather, Jacob, was dead within 6 months, of Tuberculosis. He never made it out of the lower east side. He was that sick it must have shown as the entry guards were interviewing. His mother, my grandmother Anna, died of the same illness seven years later (in Denver). The immigration authorities usually sent the sick ones back on the boat as it turned around and went back to England or Lisbon or wherever. It normally would have been a long sail back to Odessa (which they were escaping from, from the Cossacks), or wherever they could afford to be. And, c) When did he become a Berman. For that matter when did he become Irving? I know how he became Punch because he told me so. That will have to wait for another post (tease tease). My niece Isabel, has tracked down the family history and it turns out his name was Isidor Yonofsky. Some secrets, I guess, are lost to the fogs of time.
Photograph from the upcoming book, ChiTown Journal (Border Blog Press) by Bruce Berman.
Jimmy Cotton was a legendary Blues player in the Chicago tradition. He was from the Mississippi Delta and was discovered and promoted by the great Muddy Waters (also from the Delta). The Wise Fool’s pub was a mainstay Northside pub on Lincoln Avenue (across the street from another main blues bar, the Oxford Pub).
This photograph was made on the last set of a three set night (at 2:30am, April 18, 1969.
I gave Mr. Cotton a print copy of this image in the mid 2000s at a concert venue in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
He smiled, said he liked it, then added in one sentence, “Ouuu…That was such a young man.”
July 1942. “Chevy Chase, Maryland. Serving supper to motorists at an A&W Hot Shoppes restaurant
on Wisconsin Avenue, just over the District line,” by Marjory Collins for the Office of War Information
Excert from article on blog site Ravishly:
Eternal iconoclast Marjory Collins was hired in 1941.Also assigned to cover home front life during the war, Collins found her niche photographing women and what she called “hyphenated Americans”—the immigrant communities that had settled in the United States, and especially those that came fromcountries the U.S.was sparringwithoverseas. Later, like Rosener, Collins focused onwomen in industryand the struggles they faced as they tried to balance societal demands levied against them as both workers and wives.
Collins kept up with social causes after the war, and was a prominent participant in anti-war protests and equal-rights rallies in the 1960s.When she was forced out of her full-time job as a magazine editor throughageist, sexist means, she went on to found a new publication aimed at older women calledPrime Time.
How many times have I wanted to cross over the Bridge to Juárez, jump on a ruta autobus and never return to mi lado (the other side, El Paso, America) again?
A bunch of times. Actually, in the last decade, every time. ¡Muchos tiempos!
When I go to Juárez I realize within minutes that the bubble I live in America is a prison not a home. It’s a construction. A development.
Instead of working this feeling out, I take photographs, like an archeologist, always trying to root out what this means, and, for a very long time that has been enough.
Old Civil Rights leader lost in the crowd, (from ChiTown Journal) Chicago, by Bruce Berman. 1968
TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPH BY BRUCE BERMAN
Eras are always changing. They’re changing now. Old liberals aren’t enough now, socialists may not be enough next year.
In 1968 the era was changing as well. In the photograph above, Martin Luther King had been assassinated only six months before. Bobbie Kennedy, only three months before.
The old Civil Rights movement was being paralleled by the anti-war movement. The old Baptist church arguments, high on morality and sincere ecumenicalism of previous years was being replaced by the Hell No I Won’t Go movement, sincere, but clearly lacking in thought-out ideology. “I won’t go,” isn’t a spiritually-driven theology.
In one of the many protests in the hot summer of 1968, in Chicago, during the Summer of Rage, Part II, the contrasts between these two eras was becoming evident and the clash was real. The old Civil Rights leaders’ voices were being drowned out by the new Black Nationalist voices of the Black Panthers and others. The middle class kids were more enraged by getting grabbed by the Draft Boards than they were by Segregationist southern sheriffs.
This photograph, shot in Lincoln Park, Chicago, in August 1968 was a glimpse into the divide to come. By September, 1969, fourteen months later, the divide was complete. MLK was gone. The Kennedys were gone, Black Panther Fred Hampton had been assassinated by the Red Squad of the Chicago PD, Bill Ayers and the SDS Weathermen started to learn the craft of bomb-building (and went underground one year later), and the old, moral voice of the Civil Rights movement was all but drowned out in the dark and strident days that tagged the next ten years in the coming 1970s.
Eras change.
When I first got to El Paso, I ran into a guy and he told me, “El Paso is just a truck stop on I-10.”
He didn’t mention the desert, the border, the mountains, the river, Juárez, etc.
I’ve lived in El Paso for almost 45 years. It’s all those things I mentioned but, it’s also “… just a truck stop on I-10.”
It’s been fancied up lately. I’ve seen it here, before. Somebody makes out, but the fact is, if you want to be hip there’s hipper places. If you’re hip here, you really aren’t. Sorry.
But this faux hipness, which will inevitably lead to another failure, sandpapers over the very thing that is actually the cool thing about El Paso: it’s not “hip” at all! That’s its charm. That’s not pathetic. That’s genuine.
Mediocre hipness? Not cool. Genuine ruin and authenticity?
Seductive.
That allure is gone from here now. It’s crowded. The border is a mess. The hipsters are stunningly ordinary. The old folks are not of this land. They’re like the new highways, faster, less fun. Generations have passed. People that were of this land, that left, that came back, have now packaged the cultural past and have covered themselves in a cultural identity that is but a fabrication, an identity that was their grandparents, without the sweat and sabrosa. Development. What a euphemism. [Hit there CONTINUE READING tab, below]
Nelson Algren at his Chicago home site as it is being
wrecked for a new expressway, by Art Shay. 1957
INTRODUCTION BY BRUCE BERMAN
Here is a great interview by Mike Thomas, for Chicago Magazine, with Art Shay, the great Chicago photographer of the 1950s, 60, 70s, 80s, 90s and, yes, even the 2000s. He was relentless, gritty, no nonsense, a true artist (because he didn’t consider himself to be one). I used to “soup” his film deep in the bowels of Astra Photo Lab, at 6 E. Lake Street, in 1969. I didn’t know he was even an influence until 40 years later. His main lesson, by example, was: “…keep shooting, always keep shooting.” Mr. Shay passed on April 28, 2018. There will never be another Art Shay. He was one of a kind, in the manner of Weegee.
READ HERE: https://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/April-2018/Legendary-Photographer-Art-Shay-Tells-His-Remarkable-Story/
High School Beach, Venice, California, 1949 by Max Yavno
Max Yavno worked as a Wall Street messenger while attending City College of New York at night. He attended the graduate school of political economics at Columbia University and worked in the Stock Exchange before becoming a social worker in 1935. He did photography for the Works Progress Administration from 1936 to 1942. He was president of the Photo League in 1938 and 1939. Yavno was in the U.S. Army Air Corps from 1942 to 1945, after which he moved to San Francisco and began specializing in urban-landscape photography.
He was one of several post war photographers who lived and worked in what became a new culture, the Southern California middle class leisure car culture.
Girl at a counter (from ChiTown Journal), Chicago, by Bruce Berman. 1968
Photograph and text by Bruce Berman
Getting closer on the Chitown Journal book. Having to dig really really deep into old files. Feels bad and good! The hardest part is seeing what a total rookie I was and how few good images I produced. It tells me the ability to become an image-maker is a journey not a condition. In teaching, it is obvious, this generation with great cameras always in their hands and the ease of making images has sped up the process.
So I dig around in the past and watch them consume the present.
I guess I’m not the “new kid on the block” anymore.
Kid in an Abandoned Ford, Uptown (from ChiTown Journal),
Chicago, by Bruce Berman. 1971
Text and Photograph by Bruce Berman
Working on my book Chitown Journal.
Digging ahead on this but it’s like a time tunnel to yesteryear. The deeper I dig the darker it gets. Not sure, even, why I’m doing this except that I like looking at the images. When you’re looking back a couple of generations you wonder how these people turned out. What happened? Any millionaires, murderers, poets, policemen, shrinks, grave diggers, photographers, Aldermen?
Can’t know. All that I have is images. They tell many things but never facts and never data.
If a dude you don’t know was in front of your casita taking pictures, wouldn’t you go out and ask him/her what they’re doing? Would you not feel righteous indignation (your home is your castle…. why is this cat snapping photos of my castle?)?
Why does Google have a right to drive up and down the streets of this world taking pictures of your home? Who made a law making that alright? Where does this end? Is there an X-Ray camera that can penetrate the outside of your home and looks at your inside? When does that machine get arms and legs and jump down and punishes you -inside or out- for what they think is a “transgression? Is that OK for Google to do? Or the Government? Or your worst enemy? Or the local pervert?
The pistachio, a member of the cashew family, is a small tree originating from Central Asia and the Middle East. The tree produces seeds that are widely consumed as food.
OR….
Is a ginat sculpture in Alamogordo, New Mexico.
Roy DeCarava was one of the most influential documentary photographers of the 1950s-1960s. He was known more for the simplicity and ordinariness of his work than for it being spectacular or showy. His particular importance was photographing the Black community of his native Harlem and for the jazz scene of the era.
Carole Warrington and her Menominees. Chicago, 1970 by Bruce Berman
On May 5, 1970, a group of American Indians set up an encampment behind Wrigley Field. Led by Indian activist Mike Chosa, and Menominee Carol Warrington, the Chicago Indian Village (CIV) protested against inadequate housing and social services for Chicago’s 15,000 American Indians. The occupation of Wrigley Field’s parking lot began with CIV’s when a Ms. Warrington was evicted from her Wrigleyville apartment (she refused to pay the rent claiming the apartment was substandard and that the City Housing Authority was not inspecting it and forcing slum landlords to bring it up to code). This eviction led the group to a two-month encampment at a Wrigley Field parking lot.The following summer, Chosa and Worthington led a group of fifty men, women, and children in a two-week occupation of an abandoned parcel of government land, a former Nike missile base, at Belmont Harbor. Evicted from the site, they took refuge at the Fourth Presbyterian Church.
This action was part the American Indian Movement (AIM), which is still active and is an activist group that fights for Native American rights.
Vyacheslav Korotki walks out under a full moon to an abandoned lighthouse
that used to serve the Northern Sea Route, to gather firewood to help heat his home.
Photograph by Evgenia Arbugaeva
Evgenia Arbugaeva was born in the town of Tiksi, located in the Russian Arctic. In 2009, she graduated from the International Center of Photography’s Documentary Photography and Photojournalism program in New York and since then works as a freelance photographer. In her personal work she often looks into her homeland—the Arctic, discovering and capturing the remote worlds and people who inhabit them.
Arbugaeva has been a winner of various competitions. She is a recipient of the ICP Infinity Award, Leica Oskar Barnack Award and the Magnum Foundation Emergency Fund Grant. Her work has been exhibited internationally and appeared in such publications as National Geographic, mare, Le Monde, and The New Yorker magazines, among others.
The Exurbia series concentrates on the landscape that is neither suburban nor urban. It is usually found in the lands just beyond the suburbs, places where individuals and small businesses went, years ago, where the land was cheap and undeveloped. Now The Grid is coming to these places, doing what The Grid does: gobble up the land, erase or sandpaper its textures, oust the one-of-a-kind, make things safe and expected, over-electrified and deadingly dull.
Exurbia is the land that is America today, a place where the suburban cookie cutter machine has come and is bringing the American Dream, which for many is the American Bore.
San Pedro key, Alameda Street, El Paso, Texas, 2016
El Paso, Texas, 2016
Photograph and text by Bruce Berman
This is about “it” folks.
The last of this barrio, this old ‘hood, known in earlier days as El Pujido (the “push” referencing some knife fights the deteriorating barrio came to be known by in the fifties and sixties).
From the west is coming a vicious storm of hipsterism, of micro brewery culture, restaurants with fuzzy foo foo pinched across the top of, well, some tiny thing underneath.
The Mesilla Valley extends from Radium Springs, New Mexico, to the west side of El Paso, Texas. It is intersected by the Rio Grande river (which becomes the Rio Bravo on the Mexican side, which begins in El Pas/Juárez) The valley is characterized by its few remaining bosques, as well as its native cottonwood trees.
It’s been 5:00 o’clock at The Clock on Dyer Street for as long as I’ve been in El Paso (43 years).
It’s reassuring that time does not change particularly after 43 years (if you know what I mean).
But even in a land where time stands still, once in awhile, roadside signs need to be renewed.
It’s an art form. The letters are made of rubbery plastic. You have to know what you’re doing and this phantom sign renewer does. Name? Withheld. Working for the restaurant? Not saying. Getting paid? Maybe.
It’s almost 5:00PM for this image. It’ll be almost 5:00AM in twelve hours.
We like old cars because they’re like older people. A little twisted, Smashed up a little. Never gonna be what they were. Their very existence holds clues and mysteries about where they’ve been, what they did, where they lived, what happened to them.
The mysteries: What happened to twist her teeth? When did her paint disappear? What color had she been before the golden rust appeared? What tasks did this truck warrior perform through her long and, I am sure, honorable service? Who mourned her decent?
These things we will never know. There’s the limitation of a photograph: her past cannot be known, nor her future. There is only this, my noticing of now.
I guess the ultimate question is, does she still run?
¿Se serve?
If so, who does she serve and what service is left to do?
White Stumps. Mesila Valley, New Mexico, by Bruce Berman, 2018
I do not know what’s going on here but I will find out.
What I do know is that in the Mesila Valley of southern New Mexico there is less land producing Alfalfa, cotton, chile, onions and corn and more land producing pecans (which these are).
Southern California, from Southland, 1975. By Roger Minnick
Roger Minnick is the voice and the heart of Southern California, especially in the 1970s and 80s. This was the California that the rest of the USA flocked to. Surfin’ USA!
Minnick always has had his finger on the pulse of the state. He just “gets it.”
American New York City Downtown skyport, Lower Manhattan by Andreas Feininger, 1940
Andreas Feininger, born December 27, 1906, was a pioneer of modern photography. Born in Paris, son of the painter Lyonel Feininger, Andreas was educated in German public schools and at the Weimar Bauhaus. His interest in photography developed while he was studying architecture, and he worked as both architect and photographer in Germany for four years, until political circumstances made it impossible.
The Very Large Array (VLA) is a centimeter-wavelength radio astronomy observatory located in central New Mexico on the Plains of San Agustin, between the towns of Magdalena and Datil, 50 miles west of Socorro, New Mexico.
I studied with Ernst, briefly, in 1979. He was a great guy, very honest and one of the most elegant people I ever met. He got excited by Mahler while everyone else was getting excited by the Rolling Stones!
His photography mirrors that elegance. Whether it was for himself or a commercial client (he did a lot of really great stuff for Lufthansa) the work was always personal and usually intriguing.
Fred Herzog is a Vancouver photographer and an early user of color in street photography. Born in 1930 (87), he primarily worked in the 1950s and 1960s and taught photography in the Fine Arts Department of the University of British Colombia and the Simon Fraser University.
We think we’ve been watching the world through it but, in reality, it has not only been watching us, but sucking us into its world of fantasy and deceit.
Arthur Rothstein was hand picked by Director Roy Stryker to be one of the original photographers for the Historical Section of the Resettlement Administration (later the Farm Security Administration/FSA). The unit was birthed to be an explainer for agriculture projects that benefited the agrarian sectors of Depression-ravish America. Rothstein’s “eye” was excellent, his technical skills first rate and he always came back with the goods and then some.
Why doesn’t he get the attention of Dorothea Lange or Walker Evans, or, even, Russell Lee?
Was it the cow skull “controversy?”
Perhaps.
For me this “controversy has always seemed,well… overblown. He moved the skull several times and then, finally, settled on the one we all know.
South Dakota Badlands, 1936, Photo by Arthur Rothstein for the FSA
Old time professional migratory laborer camping on the outskirts of Perryton; Texas at opening of wheat harvest. With his wife and growing family; he has been on the road since marriage; thirteen years ago. Migrations include ranch land in Texas; cotton and wheat in Texas; cotton and timber in New Mexico; peas and potatoes in Idaho; wheat in Colorado; hops and apples in Yakima Valley; Washington; cotton in Arizona. He wants to buy a little place in Idaho
This is an image from the upcoming book -Walking Juárez- by Bruce Berman. It is one of the images from the story “Iceman.” It will be available on Amazon (Kindle eBook and Print)and in selected bookstores on July 6, 2017.
Extended Caption: California at Last: Example of self-resettlement in California. Oklahoma farm family on highway between Blythe and Indio. Forced by the drought of 1936 to abandon their farm, they set out with their children to drive to California. Picking cotton in Arizona for a day or two at a time gave them enough for food and gas to continue. On this day, they were within a day’s travel of their destination, Bakersfield, California. Their car had broken down en route and was abandoned.
The DOCUMERICA project was created in 1972 and its Director, Gifford Hampshire, tried to recreate the all-encompassing visual story of America that Roy Stryker began in 1936 with the Farm Security Administration project that told the story of the Depression and, more generally, the story of America as it struggled through the Depression and then toward the end in 1939, told the story of a strong America, preparing for war.
Charles O’Rear was one of the notable photographers for DOCUMERICA. For more about him, including the story of how he created Bliss (the iconic Microsoft screen image) view: https://youtu.be/_G5Z8aMctBw
Editor’s Note: The Bracero program addressed the issue of demand for labor and the need for work. It was a cooperative program that allowed America’s work needs to utilize the need of Mexico’s workers’ need for employment. It was legal, it was effective and it was a clear win-win program. Therefore it did not last. Too logical. And here we are now, 52 years later, with America needing workers, Mexicans needing employment and total chaos at the border. One could ask, is this chaos or planned exploitation?
Here is a mini-history of the Bracero Program. Let the discussion begin.
Text by Smithsonian National Museum of American History The Bracero program (1942 through 1964) allowed Mexican nationals to take temporary agricultural work in the United States. Over the program’s 22-year life, more than 4.5 million Mexican nationals were legally contracted for work in the United States (some individuals returned several times on different contracts). Mexican peasants, desperate for cash work, were willing to take jobs at wages scorned by most Americans. The Braceros’ presence had a significant effect on the business of farming and the culture of the United States. The Bracero program fed the circular migration patterns of Mexicans into the U.S.
Several groups concerned over the exploitation of Bracero workers tried to repeal the program. The Fund for the Republic supported Ernesto Galarza’s documentation of the social costs of the Bracero program. Unhappy with the lackluster public response to his report, Strangers in Our Fields, the fund hired magazine photographer Leonard Nadel to produce a glossy picture-story exposé.
Presented here is a selection of Nadel’s photographs of Bracero workers taken in 1956: shttp://s.si.edu/1gRD3VJ for Nadel’s photographs and other resources.
Not many people think of Stanley Kubrick as a still photographer. After all, the creator of such monumental classics as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dr. Strangelove and Lolita is etched in our brain as the grand American cinematic auteur.
But, even before all that, he was roaming the streets of New York City, grabbing life as he knew it. He did assignments for major publications of that era, and apprenticed with and later became a staff photographer for LOOK magazine, one of the two giant picture magazine (the other being LIFE).
Stanley Kubrick at age 21, 1949
At LOOK he photographed such greats as Frank Sinatra and Erroll Garner to George Lewis, , Papa Celestin, Alphonse Picou, Muggsy Spanier, Sharkey Bonano, and many of the greatest jazz musicians of the New York scene. It wasn’t until 1948 that Kubrick took an interest in cinema after viewing films at the Museum of Modern Art’s film screenings.
Ten Children, March 1937, by Dorothea Lange,
for the RA (courtesy of OMCA)
Text by Bruce Berman
Migrants looking for work goes back the very beginning of America, from the English/Europeans at Jamestown and beyond. One could arguably say that “Native Americans” descended from migrants from China, coming across the Bering land bridge.
In Lange’s era, as the economic Depression of the 1930s deepened and the ecological disasters of drought and erosion progressed there was a massive infra-country migration, primarily from the Great Plains and Texas/Oklahoma, mostly heading west to California.
This migration was heavily documented by the FSA and by others.
Watch this six minute video from Paul Salopek giving an update on his Out Of Eden Walk, presented to the Pulitzer Center for the 100th birthday of the Pulitzer Prize.
Gypsy Rose Lee was the most famous “stripper” ever. She started out in Burlesque at seven years of age in 1921, transitioned from Vaudeville to Burlesque and was the premier act in the legendary Minsky’s Burlesque. She appeared in sixteen motion pictures, numerous TV shows and authored the book Gypsy in 1957. The book led to the all time great Broadway play Gypsy and she was a ubiquitous personality in multiple media for over five decades.
Very early in World War II, Gypsy Lee was active in promoting patriotism and supporting the troops. In magazine articles she praised American servicemen and even offered to send an autographed pin-up portrait to any GI who asked for one. She encouraged women to take jobs in the war industry and participated in a benefit to raise money for an organization that provided child care. Gypsy performed at dozens of USO shows in a 1943 tour that visited forty Army and Navy posts across the country.
Lee died in 1970. The play “Gypsy” is still played in major and minor productions and still draws audiences worldwide. There haven’t been many like her -if any- since.
One of her best-known quotes is, ” If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing slowly… very slowly.”
Bruce Berman started this project when he was in his early 20s, in the 1970s, and just starting out in photography. He cruised the highways and the low-ways of America, no particular agenda, stopping often (to the consternation of those driving with him), always looking for the funk, the detritus of other eras, the iconography of his youth and the times before him.
This America is now almost gone. It hangs over bars in places like Austin or Madison, Los Angeles or Chicago. The Funklands have turned into “Fly Over” territory, still there, still quasi rural, but now, unrobed. The structure of the Funklands, textured, bold, spectacular, has been replaced by franchised plastic, flatness, sameness.
We celebrate corporate identity in the iconography of now, not roosters and skeletons and old Cadillacs.
The Funk has turned from delight to nothingness. Occasionally there is a McDonald’s that riffs on a local theme, but pretty much not.
The Pre Art Landscape is one in which there are images only attractive to some’s intellect that titillates the intellect of others who are over educated, over intellectualized, clean from lack of experience with the world that they choose to not touch and where, through their lack of desire to know a world around them other than the one aforementioned, allows them to revere and praise that which is without interest to anyone but them and their ilk.
So here is an image from my Guggenheim Fellowship submission. I created this less than fifteen minutes ago by walking out the back door of my slum loft (yes there are still some around that the yuppies and Julias haven’t occupied and, therefore, chased out those who were living there, not for some feeble concept of what is cool, but because, previously, they could afford the rent if they were willing to put up with the inconveniences and degradations of everything that the word “slum” implies).
If I hadn’t written this piece I very well may have earned a Guggenheim.
I coulda been a contenda…instead of -let’s face it- a bum…which is a what I am…*
I couldn’t resist the rant.
I suspect that’s what has saved my heart’s soul from an early death.
The meteorologists call this a “High Pressure system being pushed out by a Low Pressure system.”
Photographers will admit “every once in a while things come together and you get a lucky.”
What do I call it? What does one get for being out there, every evening and every day, always with your “axe (camera)at the ready, often coming home with nothing but the pleasure of having been out there trying?”
The funny thing is, as usual, I was in a part for town I’d never been in before (there are few left). It is a very unusual ‘hood for El Paso. In another city one would call it the “ghetto.” Here, no one thinks there is a ghetto. Being a predominantly latino city (82%), if you have a neighborhood that is lower income, the natural thing is to call it a barrio. This neighborhood was definitely “low income,” and of the three people I conversed with, two had been drinking alcohol to the point of inebriation. It is a mostly Black neighborhood, unusual in El Paso that is only 4% African-American.
The Farm Security Administration (FSA) started out to show government programs to the taxpaying public, to gain support for the New Deal agriculture initiatives of the Resettlement Administration (RA). From mid 1936 to late 1939 it did that but in the doing it found itself -pushed by the hand of its Director, Roy Stryker- documenting “American Life.”
The beginning of the FSA concentrated on the devastation of people and land of the agrarian sector but, as time went on, it broadened its image-making to include the way all Americans lived and worked.
The America of the 1930s is still out there, in the backlands, far away from the eyes of urban America. In fact, if one only learned of the interior of America from the mainstream media (all situated in urban America) one could not know that the America of the 1930s FSA is ongoing, alive, and functioning.
These images are a sample from the FSA road, a road I travel often, now, in 2015, seventy nine years after the creation of the FSA and their portrayal of America.
Then as now it is typified by open space, graphic simplicity and, agriculture and a sense of order now uncommon in urban America.
Pieter Hugo is a South African photographer whose subjects are wide ranging. All of them cut to the bone, right down to the quick of the African reality in the 21st century. The Hyena Men of Nigeria is part of a larger and ongoing opus.
El Paso is in transition. It was always complicated. There was the whole “Southwest” thing and then again, there was the whole Chicanismo thing, and then again there was the cowboy thing, and then again there was a certain ex Pat vibe for 60s and 70s refugees who never went home.
And there was the growing suburban thing, the Ohio is too cold and El Paso is affordable tilt.
Viva complication!
Now El Paso is getting more simple. It is trying to spruce itself up and become a destination. They have a baseball team downtown now, and a restored fancy movie theater within walking distance of it and there are bicycle riders and bicycle lanes everywhere ( a sure sign that the “texture days” are done).
It’s still El Paso but some (real estate developers and those that are young that can’t quite make it out) hunger for it to be Cincinnati. Good luck.
For those who have known El Paso for many decades, to see court jester-dressed bicyclists pedaling through downtown is jarring. It is a pure contrast to the bruised authenticity that has been El Paso’s greatest strength (for me), for those of us who have been hiding here.
What’s left is either pure decay or rot from an era of plastic, synthetics and lack of design distinction.
What would you rather see, a decaying car from the 40s, 50’s or 60s or a decaying anything from afterwards? Afterwards it’s just junk that was of little endearment before it fell into disuse.
Besides, the stuff from the post war era is almost gone, all hung up in bars in places like Austin, Portland, Cincinnati, Boca Raton and Chicago.
Authentic ruin is hard to come by. It’s a good investment for those who aspire to never ever actually live with it.
The “backlands” of the USA are either redeveloped or falling into unlivable ruin.
There are people in there, by choice or circumstance.
My next era of work will be an exploration of Authentic Ruin in the Backlands.
Kimball the American, El Paso, Texas, by Bruce Berman
Commentary by Bruce Berman, Editor
Why is it the street guys not only aren’t shy about flying “Old Glory,” but are vigorous in telling you why they love it? Compare this to any college campus. Not only can you not find a glimpse of the Stars and Stripes, there are numerous organizations that want it -or anything it represents….like the military- anywhere near it.
Is a puzzlement or is it an insight?
Perhaps, as we look at the condition of the country and the rumors of its demise, we need to start looking to the streets for some answers, not to the walls of academe.
We’re not in Kansas anymore that’s for sure. How far away from iRobot is this and how long will it be before I can get someone to clean my loft for me (hope they don’t get the crazy eyes)?
Seriously, the 3D printer is a revolution of the first order. See how Lexus designed a night prowler:
Editor’s note: Susan Meiselas, Magnum Photographer and long time great documentarian, discusses documentary photography, motivations, uses, intentions and hopes for the work’s impact on subjects and society.
This project, funded by the Open Society Foundations (Meiselas Co-Curated the project’s exhibition), shows the work of some of the world’s best contemporary photographers working in this discipline.
Restoration Square, Lisbon, Portugal. Photo: Horácio Novais Studio
A beautiful set of photos of Portugal at night, through the years, shot on Portugal Day.
Officially observed only in Portugal, Portuguese citizens and emigrants throughout the world celebrate this holiday. The date commemorates the death of national literary icon Luís de Camões on 10 June 1580.
NASA says that taking color pictures with the Hubble telescope is much more complex than taking pictures with a regular camera. The reason for this is that the telescope uses special electronic detectors instead of using film.
The finished pictures that we see are actually combinations of various black-and-white exposures to which color has been added. Sadly, this means that sometimes they play with color as a tool. The colors you see on a photo aren’t necessarily what you’d see in real life.
The way they do it, is they have different filters that capture different sections of the color spectrum. For example, they will adjust their sensors to capture red light, then green light, then blue light.
This gets them 3 black and white photos. However, they each are of a different brightness depending on what color it is. In a picture of Mars, the red photo will be brighter than the others.
After they color each photo, they combine them and the result is the photos you see them publish!
Cafe in Pikesville, Tennessee, 1936 (for the Farm Security Administration)
Article edited and written by Bruce Berman
Carl Mydans began his photographic career with the Farm Security Administration in 1935, and was quickly hired away by Life magazine in 1936. Mydans photographed national stories until 1939, when Life sent Carl and his wife Shelley Smith Mydans to cover the war in Europe as the first husband and wife photo-journalist team.
From Europe, the couple was re-assigned to the Pacific theater. In 1941 they were captured by Japanese forces in the Philippines and held as prisoners of war until 1943. Mydans returned to the war alone in 1944 to cover the Italian front, while his wife and partner remained behind in the United States.
Carl Mydans was born in Boston on May 20, 1907. The family moved to Medford, Massachusetts, on the Mystic River where Carl went to high school and worked in the local boatyards after school and on weekends. He later became interested in journalism and worked as a free-lance reporter for several local newspapers. In 1930 he graduated from the Boston University School of Journalism.
Carl Mydans, 1936
Mydans then moved to New York and, while working as a reporter for the “American Banker,” began to study photography at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. In July 1935 his skill with the new 35mm “miniature” camera landed him a job with the Department of the Interior’s Resettlement Administration, which soon merged into the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Mydans joined Walker Evans and Arthur Rothstein as the core of the remarkable team of photographers assembled by Roy Stryker to document rural America.
While travelling through the southern states photographing everything that had to do with cotton, Mydans developed the shooting style he would use throughout his career. He concentrated on people, and he photographed them in a respectful and straightforward manner. As he had been taught to do as a reporter, he kept careful notes on every shot.
When Mydans joined the staff of Life in 1936 he joined a group of photojournalists who were changing the way press photography was done. Photojournalists had traditionally used 4×5 Speed Graphic cameras with flashguns and reflector pans, and their pictures of people tended to look much the same: overlit foregrounds fell off to dark backdrops that had no detail. But Mydans and his colleagues at Life relied on 35mm cameras that allowed them to work with available light, capturing a new kind of excitement and activity in their photographs. Their success with the small camera revolutionized the practice of photojournalism.
A man in hospital shows injuries caused in the wake of the atomic explosion in Hiroshima. Credits:Carl Mydans/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Images from NIGHT TREK series. I take strolls. I shot whatever I see. Like the old days before I was supposed to “be relevant.” The phonier is dumb, There’s always fingerprints (which one forgets to wipe off) because it’s in my pocket with change, keys, debris. I’m not caring because the point isn’t to be a photographer but to stroll. I think Cartier-Bresson said something about a photographer needs to be a good “stroller.”
I’m a good stroller anyway.
All these were shot on the mobile phone camera three days ago, Monday, May 21, in the Segundo barrio, the place that I stroll often and for years.
The quality of the “tech” is marginal.
Admittedly.
BUT, the liberation of just being another idiot with a cell phone, priceless!
The mobile phone returns one (especially one who no longer looks like a Spring Chicken) to the roots, invisibility, just another vato in the ‘hood. I hate bad technique, but, I love being FOW again (fly on the wall).
What do you think? Lower technique but higher involvement? Or go for higher technique and be the outsider jamming that thing into people’s lives?
Is it really over? Film? Well, actually that’s impossible. Film is any medium that can hold an image (my translation).
But is it that film that has silver on it on an “acetate” base is over with?
Pretty much.
I teach at a university. I’ve been there for four years. When I got there I was shocked to find out that they still had darkrooms. For one reason or another we kept them. I couldn’t arrive on the job, announce “The Darkrooms Are Dead” and be the killer!
And, as we went on, the students kept saying, “We love this.”
Well, some did. Soime hated it. Some loved and hated it. Many went on to be excellent photographers (in digital).
The point was that they were still learning some good lessons -as I and my generation did- in that dim room, swathed in yellow-red light, interacting with each other as they struggled with the old wet process of film and enlarged prints.
Cool but archaic.
So, here we are, at the end of another year, and as I look forward I struggle, once again, with the idea of being the Killer.
Anyone out there have any comments on this? Opinions? Experience with being the Killer Of The Darkroom or having fought off the axe of extinction?
You got to love paper. And aging. And photos. And writing.
Yes, it’s all in the “database” there, at the end of the keyboard, through Google. But is it?
Even if it is it has no texture, no odor, no reality.
Take this trip to The New York Times Morgue. A perfectly wonderful place to spend a lifetime.
Altaf Qadri, 35, is an award winning photographer.
Qadri, 35, won a World Press Photo award this year for his poignant photograph of relatives mourning over the body of a man killed in a shooting by Indian police in Indian-controlled Kashmir.
photography Altaf Qadri
Qadri, an Indian citizen, is a native of the Kashmiri city of Srinagar. He studied science at Kashmir University and worked as a computer engineer before taking a job as a staff photographer at a local Kashmiri newspaper in 2001.
CLICK ON THIS IMAGE FOR MORE Altaf Qadri:
In 2003, he joined the European Press Photo Agency and covered the conflict in Kashmir. In 2008, he began working for The Associated Press in the Indian city of Amritsar. His work has appeared in magazines and newspapers around the world and has been exhibited in the United States, China, France and India.
André Cypriano takes us into the forbidden hills of Caracas Venezuela. He takes us into a strange land of oddly shaped houses, winding streets carved out of the hills, into a land so odd and so foreign that it must be myth but can only be reality. He notices, as all greart documnentarey phtography does, that ordinary reality, in some cases, is always more intense and mind-boggling than any fiction can be,
Cypriano takes us to Rochinha.
How he got there, who gave him access and what he encounters is worth serious viewing time. In the New York times Lens Blog post, below, wander with André.
He will take you on a journey you well not forget.
Bruce shoots Juárez. Reluctantly and with remorse.
Since 2008 the photographer has been documenting the aftermath of violence in the troubled northern Mexico city. His interest is in the effect of the Cartel War on the population of the city, particularly the effect on the children of the city who have grown up knowing little else.
His current work is in a mental institution in the city, what he refers to as “The House Of The Abandoned.”.
The body of work -The Other Truth- will appear on this site on November 18th.
Ami Vitale’s journey as a photojournalist has taken her to more than 75 countries. She has witnessed civil unrest, poverty, destruction of life, and unspeakable violence. But she has also experienced surreal beauty and the enduring power of the human spirit, and she is committed to highlighting the surprising and subtle similarities between cultures. Her photographs have been
exhibited around the world in museums and galleries and published in international magazines including National Geographic, Adventure, Geo, Newsweek, Time, Smithsonian. Her work has garnered multiple awards from prestigious organizations including World Press Photos, the Lowell Thomas Award for Travel Journalism, Lucie awards, the Daniel Pearl Award for Outstanding Reporting, and the Magazine Photographer of the Year award, among many others.
Now based in Montana, Vitale is a contract photographer with National Geographic magazine and frequently gives workshops throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia. She is also making a documentary film on migration in Bangladesh and writing a book about the stories behind the images.
A whole generation of street photographers have emerged in the digital era.
In fact there is a book dedicated to the subject that has over one hundred street photographers published.
I do not know one name.
What one can glean from this book and the plethora of postings on Facebook, Flickr, and other social media sites is that there are still photograp0hers who go into the streets with intention, commitment and courage and dance with the uncertainty of the randomness of street photography.
For a very good example of this work, visit http://www.street-photographers.com.
The work is good!
Another interesting site is on Vimeo and is produced by the prodigious street photographer Chris Weeks:
But, in the end -and most street photographers acknowledge this- there is still the master of the Decisive Moment, The Man (!), Henri Cartier-Brsson. His work is still fresh, still charming, still brilliantly composed and still a model for a generation, shooting now, who’s grandparents were barely born when Henri was snapping away with his new found Leica.
For a thrilling and significant look at Bresson’s work, view the video below.
The next post will be an in depth look at street photography in thjis era, the era of post 9/11 street paranoia, digital speed and, seemingly, the “we have already seen everything,” media.
Article posted courtesy of Huffington Post and Steve Ettlinger
Is Photojournalism Dead Yet?
by Steve Ettlinger
Born in the 1930?s, come of age in the 1950?s and 60?s, and pronounced near dead in the 1970?s and virtually buried by the closing of magazines/rise of the internet–you have to wonder how it is that some aspects of this wonderful world are still around.
Editor’s Note: This is an amazing project. In the era when people worry about the demise and/or future of journalism, when academics question the effectiveness of journalism in a 24/7 news cycle world, there is JR, who is producing and promoting another form of photojournalism and not only bringing his subjects into the communication process, he is bringing the work done on the subjects back to their environments. Check it out:
INSIDE OUT is a large-?scale participatory art project that transforms messages of personal identity into pieces of artistic work. Everyone is challenged to use black and white photographic portraits to discover, reveal and share the untold stories and images of people around the world.
This is a presentation of MagRack and is a lot of fun.
If you’ve seen the serene images he has done on Cape Cod or the somber and meditative images from Ground Zero, here is another aspect of Meyerowitz. His roots. New Yorker on the prowl where almost anything is game.
Andrea Bruce is a passionate, stylish, skilled documentary photography who’s images -in the best traditions of still photography- sear your soul and drive their point through your heart, restoring it instead of terminating it. She is the new breed of documentary photographer that blends all the skills of good journalism with all the skills of great graphic image-making and produces a coctail that is nothing less than photo alchemy.
Contact Sheet of Ashley Gilbertson’s Conflict Photography
“He has a very good news sense and for me that’s really essential,”
says Cecilia Bohan, foreign picture editor for The New York Times.
“I need them [her photographers] to be my eyes and ears on the ground.”
Ashley Gilbertson is a VII photographer and one of the strongest Conflict Photographers working today. His recent work, done far from the battlefield but in the bedrooms of fallen soldiers, is one of the strongest testaments to the outright sadness about Loss that War induces, that this editor has ever seen.
Photography has always been thought about as “another,” way of seeing.
And it is.
But, usually, we think about that as a person looking through the camera, seeing what’s there, and, through the magic of the camera and the film -or digital- capture process, one sees the world in different way.
More advanced photographers and appreciators of photography then allow for the transformative recognition of the quality and angle of light, of the Decisive Moment, of the power of distance to subject or, even, luck or magic.
It is this latter idea that infuses the work of Evgen Bavcar ((“E-oo-gen Ba-oo-char”), the Slovenian photographer is completely blind, completely eccentric and his images are totally wonderful.
In a way, all Visual Journalists who do stories on people, are doing “biography,” but with the addition of audio, where the subject can speak for themselves (edited, of course), where the image-maker can animate the images and drive the viewer’s emotions, the subject of the story becomes more “alive,” the depth is ratcheted up, and, potentially, the medium is beginning to resolve the age old struggle of photojournalism: Who’s viewpoint is this about? The subject’s or the photographer’s?
Dhiraj Singh is a Photojournalist who lives in Mumbai, India. His work has been published in numerous international magazines and online journals, including Newsweek, Vanity Fair, msnbc.com, The Wall Street Journal, L’Expresso, and, many others. He has won numerous awards (see his “bio,” on his site, above) and participated in many exhibitions. His pictures of the Mumbai terror attacks in 2008 were part of the prestigious group exhibition titled, ‘Bearing Witness’ held in Mumbai in 2009.
Documentaryshooters is honored to have permission to publish Mr. Singh’s work. We feel he has the insights and skills to show India as it is, depicting its greatness and its struggles, its deep and ancient soul as well as its modern and energetic heart. He, as no other photographer has, since, the great Raghu Rai’s seminal work of the 1970’s, ’80’s and 90’s, not only shows India and the sub continent, he makes us feel it.
This is a rock band video based on a magazine article about kidnap victims in Kashmir and those who wait for their return. This is one of India’s most revered bands and was one of India’s all time most popular rock songs.
Sometimes we forget that the “Big Work,” the work that one becomes known for making isn’t all there is.
Bruce Davidson went south, from Chicago, on instinct.
The world was shaking and he felt the vibe.
The time was now: Civil Rights.
Real change.
Without assignment or specific destination he “nailed it,” and was able to work on the edges of the news, tell the story from a personal and deeply intimate viewpoint.
This image, for me, is one his best. Beautiful composition. Beatiful moment. Beautiful storyline. Iconic and packed with all the elements that make it a novel unto itself, if this was the only photography that existed from the era it was shot in, it would, I think, be enough to tell the story of the struggle.
One word and one image: sometimes it’s enough: Vote.
Shawn Baldwin’s photographs of Egypt are lyrical, soft, sometimes tough, nuanced and, mostly, an eye that sees with the heart and feels with the intellect.
This is the kind of documentary that lets its viewers see as if they were there (although you’d have to be looking as hard as he is and putting in your time to get these beautifully done images).
In the end, because these are not screaming and specific, this work let’s us know a place and people without prejudice.
Displacement. A world wide problem. When the Grid comes you got to move no matter that there is no good place to go to from the bad place you have become accustomed to. It looks the same in Azerbaijan, Mexico DF, Lomas del Poleo, Chicago…wherever.
Rena Effendi takes us into the rarely seen inner Azerbajian, to the mahalla neighborhood in the capitol city of Baku.
This is a photo essay on the lives of the undocumented as they navigate between their homes and their country chosen for work.
In some ways the “landscape,” of this document has changed since it was photographed in the 1990’s. The immigration interdiction efforts by the United States has reduced the number of migrants and, more recently, the lack of jobs in the U.S. due to the faltering economy has reduced it even further. The personal plight for migrants in the U.S. has changed for the worse, making any return to the mother country impossible due to the danger of the return journey.
This document, however, is still quite valid. The existential delemna of home and heart weighed against stomach and uprootedness is ongoing, worldwide and, as this work shows, problematic.
This is an uplifting story of “one man’s willingness to abandon everything – his family, his country, and his friends – in the hopes of finding a better life abroad.”
This Mediastorm produced slide show of Olivier Jobard’s masterful photo essay, follows Kingsley from his home in Cameroon, through Africa and, eventually ending in the land of the “Holt Grail,” Europe.
The journey is not without its dangers and indignities for Kingsley, but another amamzing journey is Jobard’s herself.
Note: Jacob Holdt’s photographs of hate and racism demonstrate the fact that the emphasis in documentary photography is on the word documentary. Sometimes Holdt’s images are a little soft focused or grainy or whatever else one considers technically “flawed(as were Hine’s, Riis’s and every other documentary photographer who was/is worth anything) ,” but, never does his work not deliver the goods: truth simply spoken.
to record over 20,000 images of “hate, racism and “white hate groups.”
He does not consider himself to be a “photographer,” but, rather, an observer, a participator, a witness. Check his site out. It is an incredibly disturbing -and eye opening- view of America. To my mind, Holdt presents a more thorough document than the two year event of Robert Frank and his Guggenheim sponsored “Americans.”
Here is presented Holdt’s Opus: a fairly unknown collection of his massive look at America’s underbelly.
Jacob Holdt’s Vagabond yearsArriving in America with only $40 for a short visit, a young Dane, Jacob Holdt ended up staying over five years, hitchhiking more than100,000 milesthroughout the USA.
This is an arresting and strangely beautiful look at the eerie landscape left by war.
Norfolk, a trained photojournalist, turned away from the live action kind of document and approached the look of war by pointing himself at the aftermath of war as it manifests itself on the landscape. His work from Afghanistan and Iraq tells another story of war and, like all war photography is a combination of destruction, unbelievable moment and twisted beauty.
This photo essay is of the youth of Iran. Kai Weidenhofer, who is a Middle East specialist gets to the truth of the matter: it’s a small planet, so what’s the big deal?
Here is a quintessential insight into the drive to do documentary photography, a chilling portrayal of the challenges of working within difficult environments and of turning horror into hope. Listen to Jonathan Torgovnik talk about rape, murder and redemption in Rawanda.
A documentary project on Displacement…in the “Heartland!
This photographer shows how “progress,” comes to everywhere and the displacement is not limited to indigenous people either. In the end it is the interests of Capital weighed against the interests of Labor that is the issue of land appropriation and displacement.
