Wednesday, July 13, 2011

"Middle America Fights Our Wars"



Leenawee County Fair, Michigan, 2007
Eric Smith: Leenawee County Fair, Michigan, 2007



From History's Big Picture


Eric Smith has gone in search of Middle America, which he defines as the people living in the nation’s small towns and the less-than-glamorous cities far from the coasts. “Middle America drives our economy, defines popular culture, and fights our wars.” 

Smith isn’t an economist, and he admits that perhaps he’s wrong about the cultural impact of the spending power of small towns. But an Associated Press study has confirmed his belief about their importance to the Iraq war: half of U.S. troops killed in Iraq came from communities with fewer than 25,000 people. And one in five soldiers hails from a town with fewer than 5,000 residents, according to AP.



Smith took a picture at afuneral in a high- school gymnasium in Morley, Mich. “The town’s so small that two towns had to come together to build a high school, but it was standing room only with 500 bikers lined up outside,” he said. “A lot of these kids were football players and popular. They are 18, 19, 20, or 21 — fresh out of high school — so the whole school shows up.”





Funeral for Iraq War Soldier, Morley, Michigan,2006
Eric Smith: Funeral for Iraq War Soldier, Morley, Michigan,2006




Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Ernst Haas: Master of Colour



USA, 1967 by Ernst Haas


Via BBC News In Pictures

Phil Coomes

Picture editor
July 12, 2011

For many of us who came to photography in the 1970s or 80s it was black and white that drew us in, and in terms of press or documentary photography it called the shots.


There was of course plenty of colour work out there, particularly in the US, but it was an Austrian, Ernst Haas, who first grabbed my attention and showed me the power of colour photography.

Working with a 35mm camera and primarily on Kodachrome film he had an eye like no other. His pictures showed intense pools of colour and light. Were these really scenes from our world or creations of his mind? The answer was both.


Brooklyn, New York, USA, 1952 by Ernst Haas
Brooklyn, New York, USA, 1952 by Ernst Haas


Of course Haas was a big name and had been photographing in colour since the 1950s. His landmark exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1962 was the first to challenge the rule of black and white photographs in the art world. Haas was riding high and continued to do so throughout his career.

Haas was one of the early members of Magnum Photos and photographed for Life Magazine among others. He also shot film stills and his book The Creation went on to sell more than 350,000 copies. He also produced a number of audio visual slideshows feeling you could say more with multiple images than a single frame, I reckon he'd do well today.

And yet in the forward to a new book, Color Correction, William A Ewing states that Haas' pictures were often seen as being too commercial and by the 1970s parts of the art world no longer championed him.

Ewing goes on to say: "His (Haas) work was also judged too simplistic, lacking in the complexities and ironies that marked the imagery of Haas' younger rivals, who were also busy forging a new language of colour. As a result, Haas's reputation has suffered in comparison with the leading lights of what came to be known as 'the New Colour', notably William Eggleston, Joel Sternfeld, Stephen Shore, and Joel Meyerowitz."

Yet alongside his commercial work Haas shot for pleasure, and it is a small number of these pictures that are reproduced in the book.



New Orleans, USA, 1960 by Ernst Haas
New Orleans, USA, 1960 by Ernst Haas

Ewing searched through around 200,000 of Haas' pictures held in the Getty Archive in London, spurred on by a nagging doubt that perhaps he had dismissed his work too readily. Ewing says that these pictures:

"Are far more edgy, loose, enigmatic, and ambiguous than his celebrated work. Most of these pictures he never even printed, let alone published, probably assuming that they were too difficult to be understood. These images are of great sophistication, and rival (and sometimes surpass) the best work of his colleagues."

Haas' desire to shape the world as he sees it through his colour work sits well today. For we accept the way a photographer's own views alter and manipulate the picture he or she takes, and no longer hold to the notice of objective reality. It's time to dust off his archives and let them be seen by another generation, for now you can enjoy the frames here.


California, USA, 1976 by Ernst Haas
California, USA, 1976 by Ernst Haas

I'll leave the last word to Haas:

"Bored with obvious reality, I find my fascination in transforming it into a subjective point of view. Without touching my subject I want to come to the moment when, through pure concentration of seeing, the composed picture becomes more made than taken. Without a descriptive caption to justify its existence, it will speak for itself - less descriptive, more creative; less informative, more suggestive - less prose, more poetry." Ernst Haas from About Color Photography, in DU, 1961, via Color Correction.


New Mexico, USA, 1975 by Ernst Haas
New Mexico, USA, 1975 by Ernst Haas

Color Correction by Ernst Haas published by Steidl






Monday, July 11, 2011

COMPOSING THE ARTIST EXHIBITION REVIEW IN ARTNEWS


Rene Magritte, MOMA, New York, 1965
Steve Schapiro: Rene Magritte, MOMA, New York, 1965

Composing The Artist
Monroe Gallery of Photography


Cover Summer2011

via ARTnews
Summer, 2011 Issue

This exhibition of black-and-white photographic portraits felt like a series of encounters with some of the great writers and artists of the 20th century. Steve Schapiro’s images of RenĂ© Magritte are striking for the way they seamlessly and surrealistically frame the painter in front of—and thereby illusionistically within—his own paintings. One almost expects to see words in careful cursive spelling out “This is not a Magritte” across the surface of the print, so convincingly do these images embody the self-reflective paradoxes for which the Belgian Surrealist is known.

Carl Mydans’s shot of Vladimir Nabokov leaning out a car window, looking at us with eyes that are somehow both piercing and laconic and a slight grin on his face, inspired a new level of appreciation for the writer’s prodigious wit and perverse intelligence. Iconic portraits of David Hockney, Picasso, and Warhol were also on view here, but coming face-to-face with William Faulkner was a rarer treat.

The gallery’s pairing of a Martha Holmes picture of Jackson Pollock pouring paint and an Ernst Haas image of Helen Frankenthaler caught in the same activity exposes the contrasting temperaments of the artists. Pollock crouches, cigarette dangling, flinging strands of pigment from a besmirched bucket with an expression of intensity, while Frankenthaler carefully bends at the waist to spill a quantity of paint from a parkling stainless-steel pail. She is deliberate, even delicate in her approach.

-- Jon Carver
Summer 2011

Saturday, July 9, 2011

War Photography: Bomb Took 3 Limbs, but Not Photographer’s Can-Do Spirit



Andrew Testa for The New York Times

"I have never seen myself as seriously wounded," says Giles Duley.

 
By C. J. CHIVERS
Published: July 8, 2011
LONDON


TO the annals of understatement and optimism add this: the account of Giles Duley, an independent photographer, about the moment after he stepped on a hidden bomb while covering an American and Afghan infantry patrol.

Mr. Duley heard a click and felt a flash of heat as the explosion lifted him into the air. He landed on his side on the dirt, roughly five yards from where he had stood. He smelled the stink of the explosives mixed with that of his own burned flesh. He took stock.

“I remember looking up and seeing bits of me and my clothes in the tree, which I knew wasn’t a good sign,” he said. “I saw my left arm. It was just obviously shredded to pieces, and smoldering. I couldn’t feel my legs, so straightaway and from what I could see in the tree, I figured they were gone.”

Mr. Duley had become, in that flash, a triple amputee. Now he risked swiftly bleeding to death. He recalled uttering a single word: “bollocks.”

As the American soldiers he had been walking with rushed toward him and began tightening the tourniquets that would save his life, a fuller line of thought took flight. Rather than tally what was missing, Mr. Duley counted what remained.

“I thought, ‘Right hand? Eyes?’ ” — he realized that all of these were intact — “and I thought, ‘I can work.’ ”

Mr. Duley, 39, was wounded in February in Kandahar Province, becoming another in the long line of casualties in the Pentagon’s offensive to displace the Taliban from one of its rural strongholds.

Five months on, after leaving the hospital, he is roughly midway through a 12-week physiotherapy regimen at Headley Court, a military rehabilitation center near London.

There, freshly fitted with two prosthetic legs and a left arm, he has been relearning to walk and confronting the details of pushing forward in life. Pulled along by what would seem an incurably upbeat mind, he is making plans to return to work as a photographer.

WHEN he set out for Afghanistan, Mr. Duley, a former fashion and celebrity photographer who changed his focus to cover what he considered untold stories of human suffering and resilience, had been preparing to start a quarterly photography journal, to be called Document.

In an interview at his sister’s home in London during a weekend furlough, he said the project had not been derailed by his wounds. He said he hoped to publish the inaugural issue next year. But before doing so, he said, he wants to return to the field.

His first planned trip? Back to Kandahar, to photograph the medical treatment of Afghan civilians.

The technicians who fashion the prosthetic limbs at Headley Court are crafting a stubby prosthetic arm that will be fitted with a tripod head. To this, Mr. Duley said, he will attach a camera that he will raise to his eye, and then get back to work.

“You see?” he said, demonstrating how he can move the remaining portion of his left arm. He swung the stump quickly to his face. Then, with his right hand, he depressed an imaginary shutter button on an imaginary camera hovering where his arm came to its abruptly severed end. “The length is just about perfect,” he said.

Mr. Duley’s misfortune has made his own life resemble those of the profile subjects he once sought. But he has framed his lot not as a tragedy — “I have never seen myself as seriously wounded,” he said — but as a life-altering hardship that contains opportunity, too.

As a triple amputee, he said, he hopes to channel interest in his own struggles into bringing more attention to the suffering of other people. “For me to make sense of what happened to me, I have to make it advantageous to the work I do,” he said.

If this cheerful blend of pragmatism and editorial sense could seem to suggest that his journey has been easy, do not be deceived. Mr. Duley has traveled a terrifying path.

Soon after he was wounded, complications set in. Laboring on a respirator, he nearly died from a lung condition and soaring body temperatures in his first weeks in England. On Feb. 26 his family was called at night to his bedside, told that he might not last until dawn.


He survived. Even in the vigil, he said, he never accepted the possibility of death. “I would think, ‘breathe, breathe, breathe,’ ” he said.

If ever there was a thought that distilled a will to live, it was this.

By mid-March he was awake again. A new test began — trying to learn how to sit up and how to move, much less walk. With only one limb, and weakened by illness and from weeks of being almost motionless, he could not even drag himself along the floor.

ONCE the picture of self-sufficiency, he discovered that until he restored his physical fitness and learned to use prosthetic limbs, he would remain, in a word, a dependent. These indelible facts were made miserably clear in late April when, while trying to wash, he toppled from a shower stool.

There on the tiles, bleeding from a stump and unable to right himself or move anywhere, he was carried away by three nurses. He was naked. And crying. “That was the absolute bottom,” he said.

Since then he has been in almost continuous sessions of exercise and therapy, pushing himself upright and making himself start to walk, while accepting, he said, “that no matter how good I get, I will always keep falling.”

Other problems remain. He expects to undergo three more operations this year — a colostomy reversal, the removal of a bone spur at the end of his shattered right femur, the excision of balled nervous tissue in his left arm. He anticipates further surgeries in the years beyond.

All the while, he suffers from a particular affliction of the amputee: phantom pains, the excruciating alarm calls from limbs that no longer exist.

“Right now what I feel is a crushing sensation there,” he said, looking toward where his right foot would be. He added: “And there is on fire,” glancing to where he once had a left hand.

He said he had been told that these pains may never go away.

His balm is not painkillers, which he said he ceased taking a few weeks ago. It will be, he said, to restore his mobility and carry on.

For now, that means rounds of exercise alongside soldiers whose limbs were lost in the same ways. Gaining access to their regimen at the rehab center was difficult. Some in the government bureaucracy tried to block Mr. Duley’s admission.

Many objections were raised, including that as a civilian nearing 40, Mr. Duley was not in the same physical condition and mind-set as the young military men he would be working beside.

Three limbs gone, spirit whole, the photographer smiled as he recalled the exchange. “Don’t worry,” he said he jokingly assured the medical official who advanced that argument. “The soldiers will learn to keep up.”

The Giles Duley Fund
 
Related:  The war photographer’s biggest story: themselves
 
 Purple Hearts by Nina Berman opens at Royal Society of Medicine, London. Until 31st July



      

Friday, July 8, 2011

The haunting power of old photographs


Confederate soldiers in the American civil war
More than just forgotten light ... Confederate soldiers as they fell near the Burnside bridge, Maryland, in 1862. Photograph: Matthew Brady/Alexander Gardner

Via The Guardian

Johnathan Jones on Art

The haunting power of old photographs

Really look at a photograph of the American civil war and you can be swept on a hallucinatory journey to the heart of a battle

Old photographs have a compelling power. I am talking about really old photographs, from the early days of the medium in the 19th century. Here is light from more than a hundred years ago caught by a camera; here are the faces of the long dead as they really were: the face of Charles Baudelaire, the face of Oscar Wilde.


But how much meaning can a photograph hold? How much depth is there in these flat renderings of silver and black that happened to be caught on ancient chemically prepared plates and preserved? Inexhaustible meaning and daunting depth, it turns out, when you know how to look and how to show these historic pictures.

I recently saw, for the first time, Ken Burns's documentary series The American Civil War. It is well known that the American civil war was one of the first wars to be recorded by photographers. Matthew Brady and other photographers followed the armies in wagons that contained their hefty equipment. They photographed the aftermath of slaughter, the twisted bodies lying in fields.


But it takes Burns's extraordinary eye and technical mastery to reveal all that photography can show of the horrific war that ended slavery in America. For one thing, the sheer range of photographs that Burns discovered in the archives defies belief. Thousands of images have been lost, yet he seems to find records of every place, skirmish and character. It is eerie to watch what comes to feel like a contemporary film of the war, a live newsreel of events from long ago. But the reason it is so haunting is that Burns does not just passively film the images, he digs into them, excavates their secrets.

In one visual coup, the film tells us that future general Ulysses S Grant worked in the family store before the war. Impressively, we are shown a photograph of the Grant family business at the time. But then Burns closes in on a detail: a man standing outside, the image enlarged to reveal that we are seeing Grant himself, hanging about in the days when he was a nobody.


The civil war is full of jaw-dropping images. It becomes hallucinatory, a deathly journey into the heart of the battle: you are there. Photographs, this film revealed to me, are not cold relics of forgotten light; they are landscapes that you can explore as if they were three-dimensional spaces. The civil war is still happening, and will continue to happen for as long as these shadowy imprints survive. This is also true of the pictures of our own time. A photograph is a world frozen, that imagination can warm into life.

Thursday, July 7, 2011

Purple Hearts by Nina Berman opens at Royal Society of Medicine, London. Until 31st July


Via Trolley News

Royal Society of Medicine
Auchi Foyer,
1 Wimpole Street
London W1G 0AE

Since its publication in 2004, Purple Hearts has been widely featured in the international press, and has toured museum, galleries, art shows, as well as civic spaces in the United States and Europe. Most recently Berman’s portraits of US soldiers returned from the Iraq war since 2003, were shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Milan Triennale, Melkweg Gallery, Amsterdam, and at the Scottish Parliament, Edinburgh. Nina Berman is also the author of Homeland (Trolley Books, 2008)

Nina Berman talks about the photographs she took of wounded Americans on Youtube

Selections Nina Berman's "Marine Wedding" and "Homeland Security" arfe fdeatured in the exhibition History's Big Picture, Monroe Gallery of Photography, through September 25.











Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Do you think the photographers that put themselves out there on the extreme edge of society do it so they can get a write up in the media about themselves?

Fallen Soldier, Spanish Civil War, 1936
©Robert Capa/Magnum: Fallen Soldier, Spanish Civil War, 1936


Duckrabbit recently posted an article that is creating a bit of a debate: The war photographer’s biggest story: themselves. The full article is just below, with links to follow-up comments.

We are always interested in conversation concerning photojournalism, and this is shaping up to be a good one to follow. In conjunction with the current exhibition, "History's Big Picture", we have started a series of posts of selected quotes from photojournalists commenting on their professions. To date, Carl Mydans and Eddie Adams have been featured, more to follow on our blog.



Duckrabbit
July 1st, 2011

Is the ‘best’ story a war photographer can provide these days – the one that will get the most space – themselves? Not just any photographer though. They need to be western and preferably English speaking. And not just any story. They need to be kidnapped, shot, sexually abused or blown up. If they want to hit the chat shows they also need to be a survivor.


Think about it.

How many actual proper photography based journalistic stories from Libya can you recall?

Did anybody follow a Dr for 24 hrs, as opposed to just firing off shots randomly in the hospital? Did anyone hole up with a family for a few days? Did anyone track the journey of a migrant trying to escape, as opposed to just taking a few snaps of them waiting at the docks? They must have done, but I never got to see the pics. Just lots of pictures of men (better if it’s a boy) firing rockets randomly into the dessert and a few charred remains.

Isn’t there something really screwed about the fact that the people in the pictures, what’s happening to them in a conflict, now seems to be of significantly less interest then what happens to the person taking the picture?

It makes a mockery of the already daft concept of ‘objective journalism’. And its dangerous. Because it perpetuates the myth of the heroic war photographer, encourages other young people to go in search of the glamour of the gun and ends with mostly local people getting injured or killed. But for what?

Can anyone seriously argue that there was news value in printing Guy Martin’s Libya photos thirty eight days after he was wounded in Misurata? You can see a few of them here in the News section of the Telegraph. How can a series of photos be published in a News section and not even be dated? It’s inconceivable that they would have been printed as a six page spread if Martin had not been wounded. The message is simple. The photographer is the story.

The Telegraph carries an account of the day Martin was injured:

On April 20 a group of five photographers, including the Oscar-nominated British photojournalist Tim Hetherington and the Pulitzer prize-winning photographer Chris Hondros, came under fire in the besieged Libyan city of Misurata. They had spent the morning following rebel units as they fought at close quarters to clear Muammar Gaddafi’s forces from their town. That afternoon they were hit by a mortar attack.

Something is missing and that’s the Libyans who were also hurt in the attack. What happened to their stories?

The stories of the people that the photographers are risking their lives to tell have been written out of the picture.

And what about the medical team who saved Martin’s life? Nothing. The real heroes don’t count.

In some circles more has been made of a Libyan soldier or two groping a photographer than children being killed in Nato bombings. Again, how fucked up is that? How shameful of this scene that celebrates itself above all else.

Often when a war photographer dies the platitudes focus on the idea that they are involved in some selfless act; that in some way they sacrificed themselves for us. If you really want to make a difference in a warzone become a DR, a water and sanitation engineer, or a human rights observer working for the Red Cross. Yes the media are important but its nuts to be applauding people who turn up uninsured, without assignment and place themselves in the heat of a civil war, which is already well covered by the wires, newspapers, TV networks and content provided by Libyans themselves. Its nuts because it encourages others to do the same thing in the hope of making a name for themselves.

In the world of photojournalism to point out these facts is the equivalent of breaking honor amongst thieves. The feelings of individual photographers, who have been injured, or whose friends have been injured, are seemingly more important than having an honest discussion about the photographers shifting place within the narratives of war.

That’s dumb and its two faced. No-one should point their lens at the world if they’re not prepared to have it pointed back at them.

Why I am writing this now? A few days ago I recieved an email from Sara Terry who runs the Aftermath Grant announcing a new grant of $20000:

We are able to offer this year-long grant to conflict photographers who want to pursue a project about the aftermath in their own lives of covering conflict. The subject can be approached in any way – portraits, landscapes, reportage, collaboration with a family of someone who has been killed, anything that explores the personal aftermath of covering war, whether that be PTSD, the aftermath of sexual assault, the aftermath of being wounded. This is a very open and fluid call for proposals on this subject, and we welcome any and all approaches. We are very interested in supporting a dialogue about this kind of aftermath – both for the photographer who wins the grant, and for the broader audience who we hope will engage with the work when the grant winner’s year is finished.

Like I say, forget the people in the photos. The biggest story is yourself. The more fucked up the better.

Yesterday, Duckrabbit selected two responses from renowned photographers, read their comments here.

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

"A photograph can change the world and move mountains"

From History's Big Picture:

"Some assignments have been fun, others have been important photography because they came from the heart. A photograph can change the world and move mountains. It is through a photograph that we remember people and places the way they were. Some of the pictures I have taken tore my heart out. I have seen all kinds of things in my life and I have walked away from taking many pictures. I found out that I put myself in other people’s shoes and often feel that I became my subjects. When someone was wounded I felt the pain. I got tired of crying. Each year we have a memorial service for my friends killed in Vietnam and I still cry.”  --Eddie Adams

Monday, July 4, 2011

INDEPENDENCE DAY, 2011

White Barn, New Preston, CT, 2007
Bill Eppridge: White Barn, New Preston, Connecticut, 2007


• When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
-- Declaration of Independence


• Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.
-- Abraham Lincoln

• Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and success of liberty.
-- John Fitzgerald Kennedy

• Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.
-- Thomas Paine

• Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

• Those who desire to give up freedom in order to gain security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.
-- Benjamin Franklin

• Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
-- Albert Einstein

• Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of Liberty.
-- Thomas Jefferson

• Freedom has its life in the hearts, the actions, the spirit of men and so it must be daily earned and refreshed - else like a flower cut from its life-giving roots, it will wither and die.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower

• In the truest sense, freedom cannot be bestowed; it must be achieved.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt

• We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
-- Declaration of Independence.

via Times of Trenton Editorial Board The Times, Trenton, NJ



Across the Western United States and particularly here in New Mexico, at this time we honor all firefighters and give a very special thanks to the Wildland Firefighters.

Sunday, July 3, 2011

"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