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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
