2016 is History

Good-bye 2016. Hello 2017.


"All of us live in history, whether we are aware of it or not, and die in drama. The sense of history and of drama comes to a man not because of who he is or what he does, but flickeringly, as he is caught up in events, as his personality reacts, as he sees for a moment his place in the great flowing river of time and humanity.

I cannot tell you where our history is leading us, or through what suffering, or into what era of war or peace. But wherever it is, I know men of good heart will be passing there."

--Carl Mydans

On this day in 1945

On this day in 1945, U.S. and Filipino soldiers recaptured Manila.

General Douglas MacArthur Landing at Luzon Photo: Carl Mydans

 

 

 

Related: World War II in Photographs at the McNay Art Museum

San Antonio McNay exhibition offers snapshot of World War II

Alfred Eisenstaedt, V-J Day in Times Square, New York, Aug. 14, 1945. ©Time Inc. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of Monroe Gallery of Photography, Santa Fe, New Mexico A jubilant Amererican sailor clutching a white-uniformed nurse in a back-bending, passionate kiss as he vents his joy while thousands jam the Times Square area to celebrate the long awaited victory over Japan.

Monroe Gallery of Photography is very proud to have contributed numerous photographs from its collection to this exhibit.


Via The San Antonio Express News

From iconic images such as Joe Rosenthal’s U.S. Marines raising the flag atop Mt. Suribachi on Iwo Jima, to intimate shots from the home front, “World War II in Photographs: Looking Back” offers a slice of life from “the good war” — which ended 70 years ago this year — chronicling both its triumphs and horrors.

The exhibition of more than 40 prints — as well as video and memorabilia — opens Tuesday at the McNay Art Museum and continues through May 10. There are sections on the European and Asian theaters, the home front, the Monuments Men who rescued stolen art from the Nazis, and the Tuskegee airmen.

“It’s an interesting mix,” said McNay director William Chiego, who organized the show from a wide variety of sources, including the Fort Sam Houston Museum and the Library of Congress. “We intentionally interspersed these iconic images with lesser known works to show all sides of the war. We show leaders, but also the ordinary soldiers, sailors, Marines and civilians.”

The exhibition not only commemorates the 70th anniversary and pays tribute to San Antonio’s rich military history, but also honors museum founder Marion Koogler McNay, who was a strong supporter of the war effort at home.

 

McNay’s first husband Don McNay died in the World War I flu pandemic of 1918, which had a lasting effect on her, Chiego said.

“She really cared about servicemen in San Antonio,” Chiego said. “She even provided housing for servicemen here on the grounds and bought houses around town and made them available to servicemen. She knew how important it was to have a place to live and have family nearby.”

“World War II in Photographs: Looking Back” features the work of eminent names such as Margaret Bourke-White (Buchenwald prisoners), Alfred Eisenstaedt (the kiss in Times Square) and Carl Mydans, who captured two of the war’s most timeless moments: MacArthur returning to the Philippines and the Japanese surrender on board the U.S.S. Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

And then of course there’s the Rosenthal photo, probably the most beloved image of the war.

“I give lectures on history painting — French and American — and I often end with Rosenthal’s famous image as a 20th-century equivalent of history painting,” Chiego said.

But the exhibition also includes intimate moments such as Toni Frissell’s heartrending shot of a small abandoned boy holding a stuffed animal amidst the destruction of the London blitz.

“It’s important to show how much a photograph is able to document the war and how it relates to the history of photojournalism,” Chiego said. “For San Antonio it’s an important show, and I’m hoping we can get some veterans or children of veterans in here who can tell us more about some of these images. And I hope we can attract a younger audience as well, because I fear they don’t know these images at all.”

sbennett@express-news.net

More Information

“World War II in Photographs: Looking Back”
What: An exhibition of more than 40 WWII photographs ranging from iconic images such as Alfred Eisenstaedt’s V-J Day Times Square kiss to intimate images from the home front.
When: Runs through May 10.
Where: McNay Art Museum, 6000 N. New Braunfels
Museum admission: $5 to $10. www.mcnayart.org, 210-824-5368.

Labor Day "constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country."

Carl Mydans: A Pioneer Organizer Of The Office Workers' Union, Wall Street and Broad Street, NYC, 1936

"Labor Day, the first Monday in September, is a creation of the labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers. It constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country."



Labor Day 2012

Labor Day 2011

Labor Day 2010

What could we possibly have to say to the readers of this blog?

We were a bit intimidated to have been asked to write a guest blog.....but here it is:

The Photoshop Insider Blog

Scott Kelby teaches Photoshop & Photography at KelbyTraining.com. He is Editor-in-Chief for Photoshop User magazine and hosts shows at KelbyTV.com.

It’s Guest Blog Wednesday featuring Sid and Michelle Monroe!

"We were flattered and honored when asked to write a guest blog – and, we were told, we could write about whatever we wanted. But, we wondered, why us? What could we possibly have to say to the readers of this blog?" Full post here.

"Fields of Vision" series features 20th-century photographers Gordon Parks, Arthur Rothstein, and Carl Mydans

 

Carl Mydans: Cafe in Pikesville, Tennessee, 1936 (for the Farm Security Administration) c.Time Inc

via artdaily.com

WASHINGTON, D.C.- The more than 172,000 black-and-white and 1,600 color images that comprise the Farm Security Administration Office of War Information (FSA/OWI) Collection at the Library of Congress offer a detailed portrait of life in the United States from the years of the Great Depression through World War II.

Selected images from the works of FSA/OWI photographers Gordon Parks (1912-2006), Arthur Rothstein (1915-1985) and Carl Mydans (1907-2004) are now featured in the Library of Congress series titled "Fields of Vision."

These new titles join the first six volumes in the series, which feature the work of FSA/OWI photographers Russell Lee (1903-1987), Ben Shahn (1898-1969), Marion Post Wolcott (1910-1990), Esther Bubley (1921-1998), Jack Delano (1914-1997) and John Vachon (1914-1975).

Edited by Amy Pastan, an independent editor and book packager, and published by D Giles Ltd. in association with the Library of Congress, each volume in the series includes an introduction to the work of the featured FSA photographer by a leading author.

Headed by Roy L. Stryker, the government’s documentary project employed many relatively unknown names who later became some of the 20th century’s best-known photographers.

Gordon Parks, the only black FSA photographer, was "a Renaissance man," writes Charles Johnson in his introduction to the volume. Parks was a writer, musician, poet, composer, photojournalist and motion-picture director, with many "firsts" to his credit. "The first black director in Hollywood, he opened the door for young auteurs, such as Spike Lee and John Singleton," writes Johnson.

The youngest FSA photographer, Arthur Rothstein was "the truest child of the New Deal," writes George Packer in his introductory essay. Fresh out of Columbia University with a belief in the government’s social improvement efforts, Rothstein planned to earn money for medical school. But after joining the government project, he changed his career path. By the age of 25 he was a staff photographer for Look magazine and eventually became its director of photography. He joined Parade magazine in 1972 as director of photography and remained there until his death in 1985.

A graduate of Boston University’s School of Journalism, Carl Mydans was an experienced photographer with credits in Time magazine when he joined the documentary project in 1930. He later moved to the new magazine Life, and on to a celebrated career as a war photographer. Says author Annie Proulx, "He identified himself as a photojournalist and his interest in the massive global events of the time became his life."

Each 63-page, soft-cover volume in the series is available for $12.95 in bookstores throughout the U.S. and the UK, from D Giles Ltd. and the Library of Congress Sales Shop, Washington, D.C., 20540-4985. Credit-card orders are taken at (888) 682-3557, or shop on the Internet at www.loc.gov/shop/. Reproduction numbers are provided in the books so that reprints may be ordered through the Library’s Photoduplication Service.

Founded in 1800, the Library of Congress is the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution. The Library seeks to spark imagination and creativity and to further human understanding and wisdom by providing access to knowledge through its magnificent collections, programs and exhibitions.

"I am making a record of historic times"

From History's Big Picture:

“Sometimes people have asked me why I devoted so much of my life to to covering these terrible scenes, these disasters, these wars. And there is an important reason. When I began as a photojournalist I was interested in the history that was developing around me, whether it was the hundreds and hundreds of people I photographed who were the homeless wandering along the roads during the days of the Farm Security Administration, or other pretty heart-rending scenes that I saw in those days.

Why did I pursue those scenes ? Because they were evidence of one of the most important developments of my time, and I have been attracted all my life to important historical developments Some were good, lots of them were not. And I had and still have a compulsion to record history. Remember, after LIFE was born, we went through years of war. Now it is true that I could have done what some photojournalists did and in some way avoided war. But I have never avoided covering a development of our time because it threatened me. I do not think of myself as being tough. Determined is a much better description. It has never been too hot or too cold or too hard or too tiring for me to keep on going on a story worth telling. And war is one of those stories.

I want to make it clear it is not because I liked war. They were awful periods. I have often been in places where it was so terrible, where I was so frightened, where I could criticize myself for being there by saying what are you doing, why are you here? The answer always has been that what I am doing is important, and that's why I am here. --Carl Mydans

NEW YORK STOCK EXCHANGE WITH OUT NEW YORK?

Carl Mydans: A "Chain Gang" of New York Stock Exchange Officers Carries Traded Securities Each Day to Banks and Brokerage Houses, New York, 1937 



Feb. 15 (Bloomberg) -- Deutsche Boerse AG’s $9.53 billion all-stock purchase of New York Stock Exchange parent NYSE Euronext creates the world’s largest owner of equities and derivatives markets, and may spur additional mergers.

But one thing's missing: a new name for the $25 Billion exchange, and will New York still be in the name?

Carl Mydans and the Alley Dwellers of Washington, D.C., 1935

Carl Mydans: Slums near the Capitol, Washington, D.C. With the Capitol clearly in view, these houses exist under the most unsanitary conditions; outside privies, no inside water supply and overcrowded conditions. 1935

We just became aware of this excellent post on Washington's alleys and the people who lived in them in 1935, and are pleased to share it with you.

Carl Mydans & the Alley Dwellers of Washington, D.C., 1935
 copyright John Edwin Mason


"My mother was still in high school, when Carl Mydans photographed her neighborhood -- Capitol Hill, in Washington, D.C. At the time, Mydans was attached to the federal government's Resettlement Administration [RA] and was there to investigate conditions in the city's slums. Talented and ambitious, he would soon leave the RA, join the staff of Life magazine, and go on to become one of the best known photojournalists of the twentieth century.

Mydans wasn't looking for families like my mother's. Although her parents had fallen on hard times, like so many other people during the Great Depression, they remained proud of their respectability and fiercely determined to see that their children attained the middle-class status that had been snatched out of their grasp. They believed that education and hard work were the keys to success, and, sure enough, they were just that for all of their children. But there was another reason for Mydans to ignore my mother's family. They lived on a street, not in an alley."

Read the full article here, complete with numerous Mydans' photographs.

Carl Mydans: Slum backyard water supply, Washington, D.C. Backyard typical to a group of houses very close to the House office building, showing only available water supply. 1935.

Related: Carl Mydans: The Early Years

CARL MYDANS: KOREA

Carl Mydans: Korean mother carries her baby and worldly goods while fleeing fighting, Seoul, Korea, 1951



In 1947, Carl Mydans and his reporter-wife Shelly became Time-Life's bureau chiefs in Tokyo, and they remained in the Pacific area for the next several years. Carl Mydans was present during a 1948 earthquake in Fukui, Japan, and also covered conflicts leading up to the Korean War, and the war itself in 1950 and 1951.

We came across an excellent article by Brian in Jeollanam-do describing the recent anniversary of the Yŏsu Rebellion.

"Tuesday, October 19th, marked the anniversary of the "Yŏsu Rebellion," written in English also as the "Yŏsu-Sunchŏn Incident" or the "Yŏsu-Sunchŏn Rebellion," one of several bloody exchanges in Jeollanam-do last century, and one whose background serves to foreshadow the violence of the Korean War two years later. The 여순반란사건 was a crackdown against suspected communists in South Jeolla province, specifically the cities written now as Yeosu and Suncheon, that resulted in hundreds or thousands of deaths, depending on the source.

Here's an excerpt from a 1948 report by Carl Mydans---the man who took some of those photographs for Life---that appeared in Time magazine:

"When darkness came, Communist execution squads went from house to house, shooting "rightists" in their beds or marching them to collection points where they were mowed down. In 2-3-days, 500 civilians were slaughtered. U.S. Lieuts. Stewart M. Greenbaum and Gordon Mohr, Army observers in Sunchon, narrowly escaped death. The rebel sergeant assigned to kill them was an old friend, who had drunk beer with them in their billet many times. He took the two officers into a field, fired into the ground and then led them to the Presbyterian Mission of Dr. John Curtis Crane, who was barricaded in with his wife and four other missionaries.

From one of the doctor's shirts and a few colored rags the ladies made a 16-star, eleven-stripe U.S. flag and put it up. The rebels began pounding at the compound gate, yelling: "Let's kill the Americans!" Suddenly one shouted: "No, no, not them; they are my friends." It was the lieutenants' friend, the sergeant. The rebels went away.

For the first few hours the loyal troops who retook Sunchon were as savage as the Communists had been. On the big compound of the Sunchon Agricultural and Forestry School we found what was left of the entire population of Sunchon. Women with babies on their backs watched without expression as their husbands and sons were beaten with clubs, rifle butts and steel helmets. They saw 22 of them marched away to the primary school nearby, and heard the volley of rifles which killed them.'"

Read the full Blog here.

Carl Mydans: Exhausted Marine catching a nap while sitting on a cart full of ammunition, Korea, 1951

American corpsman carrying a wounded GI from Jeep to a medical station, Kwan-Ni, Korea, 1950

Related: Carl Mydans: The Early Years Oct. 1 - Nov. 21
 
Previously posted: October 20 is the anniversary of the day General Douglas MacArthur set foot in The Philippines
 
Remembering Carl Mydans

CARL MYDANS: WITNESS TO HISTORY

On the 6:25 from Grand Central to Stamford, CT, November 22, 1963

"All of us live in history, whether we are aware of it or not, and die in drama. The sense of history and of drama comes to a man not because of who he is or what he does, but flickeringly, as he is caught up in events, as his personality reacts, as he sees for a moment his place in the great flowing river of time and humanity. I cannot tell you where our history is leading us, or through what suffering, or into what era of war or peace. But wherever it is, I know men of good heart will be passing there". -- Carl Mydans

"Chain Gang" of New York Stock Exchange Officers Carries Traded Securities Each Day to Banks and Brokerage Houses, New York, 1937 

See the exhibit "Carl Mydans: The Early Years" here.

DOROTHEA LANGE'S GRANDAUGHTER TO GIVE PRESENTATION IN SANTA FE

Thursday, August 05, 2010


©The Albuquerque Journal
By Kathaleen Roberts
Journal Staff Writer

Dyanna Taylor grew up thinking all grandmothers took photographs.

But what pictures.

The Santa Fe filmmaker is the grandchild of Dorothea Lange, the great Depression-era photographer famous for her poignant and compelling images of migrant workers, sharecroppers and residents of Japanese internment camps. Taylor, now working on a documentary about her famous grandmother, will talk about Lange's work and her memories at 5 p.m. Friday at the National Park Service Building, 1100 Old Santa Fe Trail.

The fiercely independent Lange was born in Hoboken, N.J., her life forged by two traumatic events: the abandonment by her father when she was 12 years old, and her contraction of polio when she was 7, which left her with a limp.

Instead of moving into the teaching career her mother envisioned for her, she went to work for a famous portrait photographer in Manhattan named Arnold Genthe. She absorbed his artistry, the pain of her childhood feeding her sense of what suffering meant. When the U.S. government hired her to document the Depression, she produced masterworks such as the famous "Migrant Mother," shot in 1936, and now hanging in the Library of Congress collection.

"She was a challenge, and she was a charismatic woman," Taylor said. "She was quite brilliant."

Taylor's film is slated for the PBS "American Masters" series. She's still working on the documentary and hopes to see it air in 2012. It will include previously unseen footage of the photographer, as well as interviews with her still-living assistants. Lange died of esophageal cancer in 1965 at age 70.

"She was magical," Taylor said. "Everything about her was exotic. She dressed in an interesting and unique way. She wore capes; she wore berets, always heavy silver jewelry. This was not what people were wearing in the early '50s."

Lange lived in Taos for about a year with her first husband, the painter Maynard Dixon. Then a young mother, she spoke of watching the photographer Paul Strand drive by the small adobe house lent to her by Mabel Dodge Luhan. It was her second husband (Taylor's grandfather) Paul Taylor, a labor economist, who got her work documenting the Dust Bowl and Depression refugees.

Lange was the antithesis of the doting grandmother who was eager to praise the slightest accomplishment, Taylor said.

"You couldn't be a lightweight around her," she explained. "You really had to put your thinking cap on.

I learned from her as a photographer. She taught me to look twice at what was in front of me."

Taylor remembers proudly bringing Lange a handful of stones, anticipating praise. Instead of thanking her, Lange asked her if she really saw them.

"I was feeling slightly hurt and rejected," she said.

But the incident taught Taylor to look beyond the surface, a skill that fueled her own photographic career. The family often spent holidays, birthdays and weekends at Lange's cabin north of San Francisco.

"We would hike," Taylor said. "We'd spend time at the beach. We would look for stones. She would insist that we study geometry. She would tutor us in things that weren't necessarily taught in school. She was intimidating and charismatic, and you always wanted to be close to her, even though it was a little scary."

Toward the end of her life, Lange was working on a series about home, "the place where you live." She and her second husband, Paul Taylor, took two international trips, where she photographed Indonesia, Asia, Egypt and Iran. Taylor inherited her grandmother's cameras when she died.

She soon realized she preferred moving images to still photography.

"Also, it was easier than trying to replicate hers, which were so amazing," she added.

If she were alive today, Lange would be horrified by the current economic collapse and on the front lines documenting it, Taylor said.

"She and my grandfather would just be appalled," she continued. "My grandfather would be rolling over in his grave. He fought his whole career to keep the family farm alive. Dorothea would be right in there with everything happening during the recession — people losing their homes."

Taylor tried following in her grandmother's lens by filming newly homeless people camping beneath bridges and highway ramps near Sacramento last year.

"I went out there," she said. "It was difficult to film. People are angry. People trusted her. They don't trust people with cameras anymore."



Related: Monroe Gallery of Photography will present the comprehensive exhibition "Carl Mydans: The Early Years" October 1 - November 25. Mydans was a contemporary of Dorothea Lange and was also employed by the Farm Security Administration, prior to joining LIFE magazine in 1936.