Showing posts with label V-J Day. Show all posts
Showing posts with label V-J Day. Show all posts

Friday, August 5, 2011

Exhibit to showcase photojournalists' historic works; Discussion about the past, present and future of photojournalism

 Mary Vecchio grieving over stain student, Kent State, May 4, 1970

Robert Nott | The Santa Fe New Mexican
Friday, August 05, 2011

Photojournalists are the invisible documentarians of history; men and women who understand that their images will outlive them. We may all remember the classic black-and-white photo of a sailor kissing a woman in Times Square on VJ Day, 1945, but do we recall who shot it? (Alfred Eisenstaedt). Likewise, the image of Jack Ruby shooting presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald may remain indelibly imprinted in our minds, but do we know the name of the photographer? (Robert Jackson).

Monroe Gallery of Photography pays homage to the historical contributions made by photojournalists with both a photo exhibition called History's Big Picture and a public discussion with magazine editors Richard Stolley and Hal Wingo.

Both men worked as editors for Time, Life and People magazines, and the two will talk about the past, present and future of photojournalism at 5 p.m. Friday at Monroe Gallery on Don Gaspar Street.

"These are real moments captured by real people," Wingo said during a joint interview with Stolley at the gallery. "These were all done before the advent of Photoshop [computer software that allows manipulation of images]. These days you can't necessarily trust a picture."

Following up on that point, Stolley pointed to John Filo's photo of Mary Vecchio grieving over a slain student in the wake of the Kent State shootings in 1970 — an image hanging in the Monroe Gallery exhibition — and noted that a fence post seems to be protruding from Vecchio's head.

"Photoshop could erase that and probably make that a better picture, aesthetically, but it's not the truth," he said.

A lot of the images in the Monroe show suggest that photojournalism displays its power via tragic, sometimes bloody images — Eddie Adams's photo of South Vietnamese National Police Chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting a suspected Viet Cong in the head at close range, for instance, or Bill Eppridge's image of an Ambassador Hotel busboy attempting to help slain presidential candidate Robert Kennedy.

But, as Stolley points out, "There are moments of love that are caught as well," as with Ed Clark's moving photo of an accordion player weeping as President Franklin D. Roosevelt's funeral train passes by in Warm Springs, Ga.

Though these photojournalists were well trained and prepared to capture unexpected moments, luck and timing sometimes played a hand. Stolley tells the story of two photographers who were in the same place at the same time on the morning of Nov. 23, 1963.

That's when Dallas police were transferring President John F. Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, through the police headquarters basement on his way to jail. Nightclub owner Jack Ruby stepped out from the crowd and shot Ruby at close range just as photographer Robert Jackson took a photo. Jackson won a Pulitzer Prize for his efforts, but photographer Jack Beers caught nearly the same image on his camera — about half a second earlier.

"Two pictures were taken by two photographers that morning," Stolley said. "The first one (Beers) is just off; taken less than a second before the other. Jackson's is the photo that became famous."

Stolley and Wingo remember a number of photojournalists who gave their lives on the job: Robert Capa, who stepped on a land mine while covering the First Indochina War; Paul Schutzer, who was killed covering the Six-Day War in the Middle East, and Life photographer Larry Burrows, who died in a helicopter crash in Laos in 1971.

"He used up two 'nine lives' before he died," Wingo said of his colleague Burrows.

Both men feel that photojournalism remains a vibrant art form. "Young people would rather look at a picture than read," Stolley said, pointing to the success of life.com, which offers more than 10 million photos on its site.

And photojournalism does not have to rely on the written word to tell its story.

"You didn't have to say or write anything," Wingo said. "The photo says everything you want to know. The fact that it captures a moment that is frozen in time stays with you."

If you go:

What: Time, Life and People editors Richard Stolley and Hal Wingo discuss History's Big Picture

When: 5-7 p.m. Friday

Where: Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar Ave., 992-0800.

Admission: Free

Seating is first-come, first-served. The photo exhibit runs through September 25.

Related: 'This is one of the most powerful photographic shows I have ever seen and, certainly, in my opinion, the best Santa Fe has ever had the privilege of hosting.'
Review: Iconic Consciousness

Friday, June 17, 2011

A NEW ICONIC "KISS" PHOTO?

Vancouver riot kiss
The kiss ... Vancouver riot police surround an embracing couple. Photograph: Rich Lam/Getty Images


An Interesting article from the Guardian Newspaper:

Vancouver's kiss of life

The last thing we expected was an authentically romantic picture to emerge from this rioting city of glass

Douglas Haddow
Guardian.co.uk, Friday 17 June 2011 18.10 BST

Vancouver, "the world's most livable city", has been devastated. Not so much by the riotous violence that came soon after the Canucks lost the Stanley Cup, but by what the international media's coverage of the carnage may mean for the city's image.

City hall, the province of British Columbia, and indeed the federal government of Canada, are worried that potential tourists will no longer think of Vancouver as a city of yoga pants, sushi and skiing, but of mayhem and fire.

Despite all the sorrow and disgust expressed by Vancouverites over the PR fallout, one image, absent of violence or destruction, has come to define the riot.

We see a young couple laid out on the street, embraced in a kiss, juxtaposed between a blurry riot cop running towards the camera and a line of police charging a crowd in the background.

Once the photograph hit the internet, it became a viral phenomenon in minutes. Already the uncontested frontrunner for the photo of the year, it's being compared to other historical kisses like Robert Doisneau's 'The Kiss' and Alfred Eisenstadt's picture of a kissing couple in Times Square on VJ day.

At first glance, the photo seemed too good to be documentary fact. For many internet flâneurs, myself included, it was too romantic and poignant to be of this world. The breathless idealism of the lover's embrace was in such stark contrast to the mindless rampage occurring around them that the internet's cynical instincts kicked in.

How could such authenticity exist in Vancouver, a city of glass that has spent the last 20 years standing in as a discount soundstage for New York and Los Angeles. You'll find no romance in these streets, unless it's a bit of marketing-related artifice.

Shortly before going to bed in the very wee hours on Thursday morning, my suspicions seemed to be confirmed when I came across an alternate angle of the couple's moment, shot on a camera phone from above, that surely proved the kiss was either contrived or worse.

I immediately posted it on my Tumblr blog and woke up eight hours later to discover that I had unwittingly broken the story that the photograph was indeed not what it seemed. Thousands debated, some kept the faith, others declared that they didn't care if was real or not, and a few claimed they had lost all faith in humanity. A mystery was born. Was it real or not?

Over the following hours the story evolved.

An Australian woman contacted the media with what is apparently the inside scoop. Yes, the couple had been knocked to the ground, but they were fine – the photo taken at the very second the boyfriend gave his girlfriend a reassuring kiss amid the chaos.

When we look at the riot photos, images that are said to have permanently soiled Vancouver's reputation, we see young men acting out for the camera, revelling in the worst kind of apolitical theatre. Through the haze of this absurd and dispiriting pantomime, Richard Lam has captured an image of the rarest form. One that is as authentic as it is romantic and speaks to a present cultural context but also contains a certain timeless virtue.

What differentiates this riot from the countless other sports riots of the last decade is that Vancouver is pathologically self-aware. Its economy is dependent on the city's ability to portray itself as a quasi-utopia, and its citizens and politicians are obsessed with achieving the nebulous status of "world class".

The irony here is that Vancouver has at last produced an iconic image that rivals those of Paris and New York, but it needed to shatter its own fantasy to do so.