Sunday To-Do: Dorothea Lange doc Grab a Hunk of Lightning in Santa Fe

Unforgettable … You don’t want to miss it.” –Ms. Magazine

Most famous for her celebrated photograph Migrant Mother, Dorothea Lange's enduring images document five turbulent decades of American history, including the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl and World War II Japanese American internment camps. Lange’s granddaughter, the longtime Santa Fean and five-time Emmy Award-winning cinematographer Dyanna Taylor, directs and narrates this intimate documentary that combines family memories and journals with never-before-seen photos and film footage. An onstage interview with Dyanna Taylor and Elizabeth Partridge, Lange’s biographer, and Imogen Cunningham's granddaughter, follows the screening. (U.S., 2014, 120m)


2:00p Sunday, February 1 - $50 to benefit the CCA, includes pie-and-coffee reception!


Click Here to buy tickets!

THOUGHTS ON AN EXHIBITION

 HISTORY'S BIG PICTURE

This is the final week for the exhibition "History's Big Picture". We always find ourselves discussing our impressions and thoughts and the feedback we received from gallery visitors and collectors as each exhibit concludes. This time, it is different.

We have each been involved in the art world for 30 years. We couldn't begin to count the number of exhibits we have visited - or hosted as galleriests - over that period.

"History's Big Picture" coincided with the start of the 10 year anniversary of our move to Santa Fe, and after more than 55 exhibits here we wanted to present a very special exhibit, one that somehow emphasized the necessity of understanding and appreciating photojournalism.

There have been many exhibits that we wished could have run longer. This will be the first that will be actually difficult to take down. Since the opening on July 2, the exhibit has been seen by many thousands of viewers, timed as it was to coincide with the busy Santa Fe summer season. Visitors from all over the world have experienced a walk through the past 80 years in history: young, old, tours, school groups, veterans, politicians, museum curators, collectors, the "famous", and even a few homeless. We have seen parents quietly explaining the situation behind a photograph to their children, we have seen people softly weeping, and the quiet of the gallery has occasionally been startled by someone gasping "Oh my God!".

The exhibit progresses chronologically, starting in 1930's Germany with photographs of Dr. Joseph Goebbels, and the first meeting of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini that have caused several visitors to whirl about and face the front desk and exclaim "This is serious!"

The photographs from Depression-era America have instantly resonated with gallery guests as they compare that time with the current economic condition. Interestingly, the same comparison has just recently been addressed in articles in the Los Angeles Times and The Guardian.

And from there the exhibition continues, a roller coaster through World War II, the 1950's; the brief hope of John Kennedy and the violent and shocking end of that hope; through the civil rights struggle and another shocking assassination, the shining hope of Robert Kennedy, the devastation of his assassination; the horror of Vietnam, the shock of 9/11, and the complicated consequences of America's involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The final photograph is by Eric Smith of the casket of an Iraq War soldier on an empty stage prior to his memorial service delivers visitors near the exit and the front desk, and often a conversation ensues. Some need to talk, some need comfort, some have been angry, and some have been inspired to find out more.

This exhibition has affirmed our steadfast belief in the power of a photograph. The exhibit's press release stated "Photographers in this exhibition illustrate the power of photography to inform, persuade, enlighten and enrich the viewer's life." And on the About Us page of our website we state " The way a photograph can capture time, emotions, and feelings makes photography a unique art form". We have witnessed this first hand and in a very powerful confirmation during this exhibit.

We are so grateful for all of the participating photographers, so many of whom we have been privileged to have known know personally. For those who are no longer living with us, we thank their families. For those still working, we honor your commitment and service to humanity.

We are so very thankful to all who have visited the exhibit. There are discussions about the possibility of travelling the exhibit to some museums, so if you missed it stay tuned. It will continue to live on our website in the Archived Showcase section as well.

Thank you.

Photographing the Great Depression, then and now

Florence Owens Thompson, a migrant worker and mother of seven children. Photograph: Dorothea Lange/Getty Images

Dorothea Lange's stark portraits of poverty-stricken Americans in the 1930s seem terrifyingly contemporary

Jonathan Jones

 Friday 16 September 2011 09.00 EDT

Via the Guardian

Faces from the Great Crash of 1929 and its aftermath are haunting the 21st century. Wall Street brokers fleeing the trading floor in panic, or putting their cars on sale because they are suddenly broke, appear in old black-and-white photographs beside analyses of the current state of the markets composed by sombre authorities. Not only the collapse of confidence that shattered investors 82 years ago but the long years of misery that followed now seem to call out to us, to warn us, to show us a truth that is urgent and immediate. Can this really be so? Can that nightmare history be repeating itself?

This week an American paper, the Los Angeles Times, republished one of the most renowned of all depression photographs. Dorothea Lange was working in 1936 for an American government agency called the Resettlement Administration, documenting the journeys of desperate farm labourers in search of work. In Nipomo, California she met Florence Owens Thompson and her children. Lange's picture of the road-weary family has endured because it is an intimate human portrait, that cuts through statistics and abstractions to show us real life in the Depression. The weather-beaten, stoical, dignified face of Thompson, her children burying themselves in her for protection, speaks of poverty that is not destined, or deserved, or inevitable, of people whose suffering is random, cruel and, surely, preventable.

Out of the Great Depression in 1930s America and Europe came a broad acceptance that society needed to do better, that markets could not guarantee universal wealth or even survival by themselves, that governments needed to do two things as a matter or course: manage the economy, and ensure the welfare of citizens. At least the western democracies reached this consensus by 1945, after 16 years of chaos, during which far more dangerous alternatives to capitalism took the world by storm. Lange's photograph was shocking in 1936 because it revealed that extreme poverty now existed on a frightening scale in the United States, the country where wealth was freest, industry most advanced, whose business was business. If capitalism was failing in America, did that mean it was finished?

In 1936, when this picture was taken, many believed Karl Marx right in his prediction that capitalism would be broken by its contradictions. They looked admiringly to Russia or even joined communist parties. Meanwhile, Hitler's Germany blamed the troubles on Jewish financiers and created work through massive public schemes. Liberal, capitalist democracy would only regain strength with the new consensus for welfare and planning that emerged from the second world war.

The face of Florence Owens Thompson in Lange's photograph is hemmed in by shadows of this dark period in history. So why did she make her appearance on the LA Times the other day, on the breakfast tables of film producers and television executives? The article was asking why today's artists have not risen to the challenge of depicting what it claimed is already a new depression – where is our Dorothea Lange? Yet the real question seems to be why we suddenly find images of the 1930s pertinent and recognisable and … contemporary.

The stark images of the 1929 crash and the 1930s depression that currently haunt us are forebodings, night terrors, nervous jitters. They express something essential about the state of the world in 2011: fear.

Nothing is scarier than the thought that we might be repeating the history of the 1930s. There is no more terrifying period in human history. The economic travails of that time tore apart societies. Americans suffered catastrophic poverty, as shown in Lange's photograph. Germans succumbed to the politics of hate, Spain became a battleground, soon Europe would be one. All that is evoked in chilling photographs of the depression era.

This is a moment of sweat and nerves. Over the summer, financial news got eerie. As it happens, the nightmare scenarios have not yet come to pass – some were predicting a collapse of the euro in August. The threat of Washington failing to raise the American debt ceiling was another panic averted at the last moment. But the fears continue.

Fear is a historical force. At the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789 peasants were driven to violence by a "great fear", a panic that swept the countryside. It was, of course, during the Great Depression that president Franklin D Roosevelt made his famous speech denouncing the irrationality of fear. He used his inaugural address in 1933 to urge "that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyses needed efforts to convert retreat into advance".

Here is something truly eerie – the thing we have in common with the people of the Great Depression is a mood of deepening fear, "nameless, unreasoning …"

In America in 1933, Roosevelt faced down fear and insisted that rational measures could defy the forces of destruction. Meanwhile, that same year Hitler took power with a politics of pure unreason that feasted on terror.

Today it is avowedly democratic politicians who seem ready to exacerbate terror. Deficits are talked up as ghoulish menaces, social ills blamed on moral decay. In America, government itself, as any kind of rational agent for reform, is widely portrayed as a monster.

When Lange took her photograph, times were terrible. But there were powerful voices of optimism and rationality, from Roosevelt to John Maynard Keynes, and these voices would win through in the end. In 2011 American politics seems headed in the opposite direction to the forward-looking road it took in the 1930s, while everywhere primitive gloom is in the ascendant. In this sense the situation does not resemble the 1930s. It is potentially far worse.


Related: Facing Change: Documenting America

Where's Today's Dorothea Lange?

Hard times have spawned great art — but not these hard times, it seems.

September 12, 2011

By Jaime O'Neill

Economists and politicians told us that the recession was over, though some of them now worry about it taking a double dip. For those of us living farther from the ledger sheets and closer to the reality of what's happening in our towns and on our streets, this has been and remains a depression. It's hard to make the word stick, however, because we haven't developed the iconography yet. We don't have bread lines, dance marathons, guys selling apples on street corners or men jumping from high buildings because they've been wiped out in the stock market.

The pain and suffering has only been superficially covered by the news media, but it has surely not been addressed by our artists. In the 1930s, John Steinbeck chronicled the Depression as it played out in the lives of the Joads, his fictional Okies. He invented those memorable characters to vivify all the abstractions of the policymakers and to give literary voice to the suffering so many nonfictional Americans were experiencing.

There were a raft of other artists who also were telling the tale, making people see, hear and feel the pain as only the arts can do. There was Dorothea Lange taking photos and Woody Guthrie writing songs. Hollywood was doing its part too, and not only with a movie version of Steinbeck's novel. Unlike current audiences, moviegoers in the '30s were persistently reminded by what was on the screen of what awaited them when they resumed their lives outside the theater. Even "King Kong," generally conceded to be pioneering escapist fare, begins with Fay Wray in a bread line.

In our own times, when Iraq and Afghanistan war vets are suffering double-digit rates of unemployment, you can't find much mention of those veterans and their struggles in our movies. But, in 1932, "I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang" gave cinematic life to the kind of men who would march on Washington as part of the Bonus Army, a legion of out-of-work World War I vets who squatted in the nation's capital to bring attention to their plight — an appeal that was ultimately met not with aid but with violence.

Even musicals like "Gold Diggers of 1933" (which gave us the song "We're in the Money") is structured around the story of war heroes who were shamed by the need to seek inadequate public assistance. There also were more overtly political films in 1933, movies like "Wild Boys of the Road," a gritty portrayal of unemployed young men jumping freights to find work.

A few recent indie films have provided glimpses of what the Joads might look like in this new century — "Winter's Bone" comes most forcefully to mind — but mostly the moviemakers are far removed, in their own lives and in their products, from what the majority of Americans are living through now.

Musical artists too are looking the other way. What hit song of the last three years gives voice to our times in the way "Brother Can You Spare a Dime?" gave voice to the 1930s? Where are the songs that evoke images of vacancies in the shopping malls, people driven from their foreclosed homes and couples whose marriages are shattered by the frustrations of their hardships?

A long time ago, during an early peace march through San Francisco, I remember a young guy in an apartment a couple of floors above the street putting a speaker in his window and blasting Bob Dylan singing "The Times They Are A-Changin' " to the protesters marching by. The feeling of support and solidarity that music contributed on that day was palpable, and it came at a time when public sentiment had not yet turned against the Vietnam War.

Years later, in a none-too-brave new world, I attended a Dylan concert in the months following 9/11. The "senators and congressmen" Dylan had once referenced in his old song were then talking about taking us to war in Iraq. I hoped on that night that the protege of Woody Guthrie would say a word or two about the times we were living in. But he said nothing, having long since decided he didn't want to be an oracle, didn't want to speak except through his songs. For many fans, it would have been balm to us had Dylan used even the slimmest portion of his art to provide the sense of solace he'd given so many dissenters long ago.

A few months after seeing Dylan, I saw Jerry Seinfeld. It was a few weeks after the shoe bomber had attempted to blow up an airplane. No one goes to see Seinfeld for political commentary, but he made a joke about the shoe bomber, and it was therapeutic, allowing us to laugh at the boogeyman. It was art employed in the interest of sanity. It's been said that humor is our shield against insanity. So far, we've mostly been crazy this century, and there hasn't been much shielding us from it. The comedians, such as Jon Stewart, Will Durst and Bill Maher, have filled the vacuum the other arts have abandoned.

As much as anything, the arts define the times, sketching a portrait of a moment in the life of the nation and the world, marking a period in ways it comes to be viewed by people who live through it and by people who come after. But the tale of our times is mostly being told by our unwillingness to tell it.

Jaime O'Neill is a writer in Northern California.

Suggested - Be sure to visit Facing Change: Documenting America 

Facing Change: Documenting America is a non-profit collective of dedicated photojournalists and writers coming together to explore America and to build a forum to chart its future. Mobilizing to document the critical issues facing America, FCDA teams will create a visual resource that raises social awareness and expands public debate.    

Phoenix Art Museum Exhibition Features Many of Gordon Parks' Most Memorable Images

Gordon Parks, American, 1912–2006; Alberto Giacometti, Paris, 1951, printed 2003; gelatin silver print, 16 x 20 inches; Lent by The Capital Group Foundation, 2002.02 © 2006 The Gordon Parks Foundation

Via artdaily.com

PHOENIX, AZ.- Gordon Parks spent the majority of his professional career at the crossroads of the glamorous and the ghetto – two extremes the noted photographer knew well. Perhaps best recognized for his works chronicling the African-American experience, Parks was also an accomplished fashion photographer. Bare Witness: Photographs by Gordon Parks provides a revealing look at the diversity and breadth of Parks’s most potent imagery. Featuring 73 works specifically selected by Parks for the photographic collection of the Los Angeles-based Capital Group, Bare Witness divulges heart wrenching images, iconic moments, celebrities and slices of everyday life.

Born in 1912 in Fort Scott, Kansas, Parks, who died in 2006 at age 93, was an African American photographer who began working professionally in the 1930’s. Parks tackled the harsh truth and dignity of the black urban and rural poor in the United States. He photographed aspects of the Civil Rights movements and individuals associated with the Black Panthers and Black Muslims. For nearly 25 years, from 1948 to 1972, he served as staff photographer for Life magazine. He also established himself as a foremost fashion photographer, providing spreads for respected magazines such as Vogue.

Bare Witness features many of Parks’s most memorable images such as “American Gothic.” Taken during Parks’s brief time with the Farm Security Agency, the photograph depicts a black cleaning woman named Ella Watson standing stiffly in front of an American flag, a mop in one hand and a broom in the other. Also included in the exhibition is a series of photos from Parks’s most famous Life magazine essay about Flavio da Silva, a malnourished and asthmatic boy living in a Rio de Janerio slum. Portraits of Muhammad Ali, Duke Ellington, Alexander Calder, Ingrid Bergman, Langston Hughes and Malcolm X among others will also be on view.

“Whether photographing celebrities or common folk, children or the elderly, Harlem gang leaders or fellow artists, Parks brought his straightforward, sympathetic ear and mind to bear witness to late 20th century civilization,” commented Hilarie Faberman, the Robert M. and Ruth L. Halperin Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Cantor Arts Center and organizer of the exhibition. “His photographs balance the dichotomies of black and white, rich and poor, revealing his strengths and struggles as an artist and a man.”

In addition to his documentary and fashion photography, Parks was a filmmaker, author, musician and publisher. He was the first black artist to produce and direct a major Hollywood film, “The Learning Tree” in 1969, which was based on his early life experiences. He subsequently directed the popular action films “Shaft” and “Shaft’s Big Score.” He was a founder and editorial director of Essence magazine and wrote several autobiographies, novels and poems. In 1988, he received the National Medal of Arts award and throughout his lifetime was the recipient of 40 honorary doctorates from colleges and universities in the United States and England.

“Parks was a renaissance man whose career embodied the American ideal of equality and whose art was deeply personal."

"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 AT NIGHT, DECEMBER 20, 1934

In our previous post, we wrote about the official beginning of the winter season. Nation Public Radio's "The Picture Show" reminded us of a truly iconic photograph, one that only could have been made on the shortest day of the year, on a fleeting moment when the city was slightly darkened, but the office lights remained on.


New York City At Night, 76 Years Ago

by Shannon Perich
© NPR



Between 4:30 and 5 p.m. on Dec. 20, 1934, Berenice Abbott's camera was hanging off an upper floor of the Empire State Building recording New York City at Night.

With a fixed artistic vision, the location scouted and exposure calculated for fifteen minutes, the independently-minded photographer captured that fleeting moment when the city was slightly darkened, but the office lights remained on.


For some, this photograph, though some 76 years old, may seem somewhat familiar with its dramatic angles, hovering perspective and workers still in their offices after dark. But for Abbott, it represented the emerging of the modern New York and new lifestyles that came with it.

Abbott was born in 1898 in Springfield, Ohio, and moved to New York in 1919. Frustrated by the commercialism and politics threatening her Greenwich Village bohemian lifestyle (like Prohibition), and intrigued by the artistic and literary of circles of Paris, she moved in 1921. Her eight years in Paris were pivotal in shaping her as a photographer.

She was versed in sculpture, drawing and writing, but it was during her employment in Man Ray's photography studio that she learned to make photographs. Ray (1890-1976) ran a famous portrait studio but in his spare time was at the vanguard of surrealist photography. He challenged the conventional approaches to photography, which provided Abbott with opportunities to become a successful portrait photographer in her own right. He also introduced her to Eugene Atget (1857-1927), a photographer noted for tirelessly documenting the architecture, urban views and landscapes of Paris.

The modernist tendency to see the city as a valid subject and as a scene for formal studies — and the appreciation for long-term documentary work — were both visible trends in Abbott's photography by the time she returned to America in Jan. 1929.

It might be difficult for our contemporary eyes and city experiences to allow us to imagine Abbott's New York City at Night as a new view of the world. In 1932, the Great Depression was still plaguing many Americans. And the Farm Security Administration was about to create a vision of America that remains seared into a shared visual history — with photos from the field like Migrant Mother.

But Abbott's cityscape offers a perspective of excitement about American technological achievements — through her ability to blend cubist visual constructions with the reality of urban modern architecture. The photograph also holds some of the romance and mystery of the night that Ella Fitzgerald sings about in Cole Porter's song, All Through The Night, from the musical Anything Goes.

This image, perhaps her most well-known, remains a visually exciting image with complex rhythms that might offer our jaded eyes a way to see the city with refreshed excitement.

Abbott's enthusiasm for documenting New York City resulted in an extraordinary documentary project that can be explored in her book Changing New York. Many of those photographs can be seen at the Museum of the City of New York, where Abbott left her archive.

The Smithsonian's Archive of Art also holds many documents related to the Federal Art Project that funded the massive photography project and Abbott’s assistant Elizabeth McCausland's papers. Abbott's legacy also continues through a photography award in her name that is given to emerging photographers with a body of work waiting to be published.

Shannon Thomas Perich is an associate curator of the Photographic History Collection at Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Her regular contributions to The Picture Show are pulled from the Smithsonian's archives. See the original NPR article here.

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: THE EARLY YEARS

 Cafe in Pikesville, Tennessee, 1936 (for the Farm Security Administration)

Monroe Gallery of Photography is pleased to announce "Carl Mydans: The Early Years”. (Carl Mydans: May 20, 1907 – August 16, 2004) The exhibition opens with a reception Friday, October 1, 5 - 7 PM, and continues through November 21.


Born in Massachusetts, near Boston, in 1907, Mydans’ keen sensitivity and honesty compelled him toward a lifetime of social and historical documentary photography. After working for the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald, he joined the photographic staff of the Farm Security Administration in 1936. The FSA, as it was familiarly known, was a New Deal agency established during the Great Depression by Franklin Roosevelt designed to combat rural poverty during a period when the agricultural climate and national economy were causing great dislocations in rural life. The photographers who worked under the name of the FSA were hired on for public relations; they were supposed to provide visual evidence that there was need, and that the FSA programs were meeting that need. Roy Stryker, who Mydans described as one of the most important influences in his life, headed the FSA. Stryker hired Mydans, along with several other photographers who were also later to become legendary, such as Walker Evans, Gordon Parks, Dorothea Lange, and Arthur Rothstein, to document the conditions of people and their surroundings most affected by the Depression.

The Nation's Capitol viewed from a nearby slum area, Washington, DC (for the Farm Security Administration)

“My very first period, when I was photographing with the FSA, I consider to be my most meaningful body of work. Before that, I didn’t know what America really was. I learned who the people were, what they thought, what they did, what they read and what they cooked and ate. There are some things that come back to me, and when I see a farmer tilling his rice in Asia, there’s something about that Asian farmer that carries me back to our own American farmers in 1936. In a word, that experience I had working with the FSA, in 1936 and 1937, gave me a greater feeling for America, and from that a greater feeling for the people of the world.” – Carl Mydans, 1997  
 

Brick carrier at model community planned by the Suburban Division of the U.S. Resettlement Administration, Greenbelt, Maryland, 1936 (for the Farm Security Administration)

Featured in the exhibition is a rare and distinct collection of limited-edition prints from the FSA archives, specially selected from a large body of his work that is owned by the United States government. These prints were all made in by Mydans in1993 from his original negatives, which he borrowed from the Library of Congress. Each of the FSA photographs were signed by Mr. Mydans, and each image is limited to a total edition of between just six and fifteen examples.

After 16 months with the government, Mydans joined LIFE magazine as a staff photographer in 1936, just after the inaugural issue. Included in the exhibition are rare early vintage prints from the archives of LIFE magazine - the actual prints used for early LIFE magazine stories, with important archive information inscribed and stamped on the back of each photograph. Together with the FSA photographs, they provide a humanitarian and emotional record of this turbulent time in American history, an integral element to their lasting appeal over 70 years later.

Over four decades, Mydans carried out the full gamut of typical Life stories, from Hollywood celebrities to Texas cattle roundups, but his most important assignment, starting with the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939, was as a war photographer. Resourceful, determined and unruffled, Mr. Mydans managed to send back pictures of combat that even now define how we remember World War II, Korea and other conflicts. He photographed major news and feature stories in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Mydans reported on the Russo-Finnish winter war, Italy under Mussolini, and the fall of France. When war erupted in Europe, Mydans and his wife, LIFE researcher Shelley Smith, became the magazine’s first husband and wife team to be sent overseas. Constantly traveling, Mydans’ assignments took him to Britain, Sweden, Finland, Italy, France, China, Malaya, and the Philippines, where he and his wife were captured by the Japanese. Released after being held prisoner of war for two years, Mydans was sent back into war in 1944, eventually covering the stoic figure of General MacArthur landing at Luzon. This famous image eloquently captures the pride and determination of the great commander and stands in dramatic contrast to the sense of shame and resignation expressed in the photographs he made of the Japanese surrender aboard the U.S.S. Missouri from the same year.



Daughter of migrant workes near Raymondville, Texas, 1937 (vintage print)

“As a storyteller in pictures, the photojournalist is looking not only for action but for substance. He is a historian and a sociologist. He has created humanity’s first international language, a common imagery for all mankind. And in his pictures, people see themselves with a clarity they never knew before.”--Carl Mydans

View the exhibition here.

OCTOBER IN SANTA FE

Ernst Haas: New Mexico, 1952  vintage chromogenic print  10 x 8 inches

Autumn has almost officially arrived and so will cooler weather. October arrives in full golden glory as aspen trees display their glowing fall colors, usually through the middle of the month. The Santa Fe Ski Basin offers a wonderful Fall Scenic Chairlift that is an ideal way to take in the foliage. With highs averaging 67 degrees and lows dipping to 37 degrees, October's crisp, cool weather is ideal for hiking, biking and other outdoor activities.

Monroe Gallery of Photography starts the month with a timely and significant exhibition: "Carl Mydans: The Early Years". There is an opening reception on Friday, October 1, from 5 - 7 PM.

Cafe in Pikesville, Tennessee, 1936 (for the Farm Security Administration) ©Time Inc

Born in Massachusetts, near Boston, in 1907, Carl Mydans’ keen sensitivity and honesty compelled him toward a lifetime of social and historical documentary photography. After working for the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald, he joined the photographic staff of the Farm Security Administration in 1936. The FSA, as it was familiarly known, was a New Deal agency established during the Great Depression by Franklin Roosevelt designed to combat rural poverty during a period when the agricultural climate and national economy were causing great dislocations in rural life. The photographers who worked under the name of the FSA were hired on for public relations; they were supposed to provide visual evidence that there was need, and that the FSA programs were meeting that need. Roy Stryker, who Mydans described as one of the most important influences in his life, headed the FSA. Stryker hired Mydans, along with several other photographers who were also later to become legendary, such as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, and Arthur Rothstein, to document the conditions of people and their surroundings most affected by the Depression.

Carl Mydans: Demonstrators in a Works Progress Administration (WPA) Strike, 1937 (©Time Inc)

Featured in the exhibition is a rare and distinct collection of  prints from the FSA archives, specially selected by Mydans in 1993 from a large body of his work that is owned by the United States government; as well as rare early vintage prints from the archives of LIFE magazine - the actual prints used for LIFE magazine stories. (Watch this blog for more information shortly.)

Mark Edward Harris will also join us that evening to sign copies of the second edition of his book, The Way of The Japanese Bath. A selection of prints from the book, specially printed with rich charcoal tones on washi paper, will be on exhibit.

Mark Edward Harris: the Way of the Japanese Bath

The annual Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta takes place October 2 - 10. Each day, it fills the skies south of Santa Fe with hundreds of colorful hot air balloons that dazzle the crowds during morning and evening Balloon Glows, Mass Ascensions and an array of contests. It is the largest ballooning event on earth, the most photographed event on earth, and the largest annual international event held in the United States.

For 10 years, the Santa Fe Film Festival took place in early December. In 2010, it moves to October 20 - 24, continuing to feature innovative programing. The festival showcases films made in the Southwest as well as independent American-made narrative films, films made outside the U.S., documentaries and art films celebrating the creative spirit. With a full schedule of workshops, panels, parties, awards and more, the Santa Fe Film Festival has become an exciting and popular film event that appeals to professionals and fans alike. on Friday, October 22, Monroe Gallery is very pleased to welcome acclaimed photographer Brian Hamill for a special reception and exhibition. In the late 1960s, Hamill began a career as a photojournalist and also worked as an assistant to several top fashion photographers. Hamill has worked as a unit still photographer on over seventy-five movies including twenty-six Woody Allen films, resulting in the much acclaimed coffee table photo book entitled “Woody Allen At Work: The Photographs of Brian Hamill” (Harry N. Abrams, 1995). Please join us on October 22, from 5 - 7 PM, to welcome Brian and enjoy his photographs from the movies.

Brian Hamill: Diane Keaton and Woody Allen, 59th Street Bridge, New York, 1978, "Manhattan"

For a full calendar of October events, visit the official Santa Fe Convention and Visitors web site here.