Tuesday To-Do in NYC: Underfire: The Untold Story of Pfc. Tony Vaccaro Discussion at ICP

Via ICP

World War II, Tony Vaccaro played two risky roles, serving as a combat infantryman on the front lines, as well as a photographer who shot nearly 8,000 photographs. Though he began as a young GI eager to record the war, he vowed never to take another war photo on the day the conflict ended, horrified by what he had seen.

Underfire: The Untold Story of Pfc. Tony Vaccaro chronicles the life and vision of this remarkable man, exploring how photography defines the way the public perceives armed conflict, and revealing the sheer difficulty of survival while taking photos in a war zone.

Clips from the film will be shown, followed by a panel discussion. (The entire film will not be shown.)

Panelists

• Tony Vaccaro
• Max Lewkowicz
• James Estrin

Bios

With a $47 camera and developing the negatives in his helmet at night, World War II infantryman Tony Vaccaro took nearly 8,000 photographs on the frontline, creating one of the most comprehensive, haunting, and intimate photographic records of combat of all time. In the decades that followed the war, Tony would go on to become a renowned commercial photographer for magazines such as Look, Life, and Flair, capturing everyone from Marilyn Monroe and Sophia Loren to Pablo Picasso and John F. Kennedy. Tony's work is currently on display at a retrospective in Caen, France and housed in a permanent museum in his honor in Bonefro, Italy. His work is represented by Tony Vaccaro Studio in New York and he is the subject of HBO Documentary Underfire: The Untold story of Pfc. Tony Vaccaro, premiering November 14, 2016.

Max Lewkowicz, founder and owner of Dog Green Productions and director of Underfire: The Untold Story of Pfc. Tony Vaccaro, has written, directed, and produced feature films and hundreds of productions for network and public television, museums, and multinational organizations. He is the recipient of a New York Emmy for his feature film Morganthau, as well as the Silver Screen Award at the U.S. International Film and Video Festival, the grand prize of The Chicago International Film Festival, and the 2003 Award of Excellence from the National Association of Museum Exhibitions.

James Estrin is a Senior Staff Photographer for the New York Times. He is also a founder of Lens, the Times's photography blog, and co-edits it with David Gonzalez. Mr. Estrin has worked for the Times since 1987 and was part of a Pulitzer Prize winning team in 2001. He is a co-executive producer of the movie Underfire: The Untold Story of Pfc. Tony Vaccaro, which will appear on HBO in November 2016. He teaches at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism and the School of Visual Arts Digital Photography Program as well as at Anderson Ranch in Aspen, Colorado. Mr. Estrin attended the Advanced Studies Program at the International Center of Photography from 1979 to 1980.

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Full details here.


View Tony Vaccaro's photographs at Monroe Gallery of Photography

One-year anniversary photography exhibit on Hurricane Sandy at the Museum of the City of New York

Stephen Wilkes

Strong winds and waves unmoored this home from its foundation in the Oakwood neighborhood of Staten Island. 2012.

 

 

Via The New York Times Lens Blog

 

 

Full post here

 

 

 

Related: Rising Waters: Photographs of Sandy

 

  Jet Star Roller Coaster, Iconic symbol of Hurricane Sandy devastation, demolished

 

   Stephen Wilkes' Sandy Photographs Among TIME's Best Photojournalism of 2012

A Storyteller Is Seen With New Eyes

Grey Villet:"Slo-Pokes", Drag Racing In Moline, Illinois, 1957

Via The Wall Street Journal


"(Grey)  "Villet really fits into that ICP/Cornell Capa tradition—not only with photojournalism but this real interest in ordinary people and their lives."
 --Erin Barnett, International Center of Photography


"My sense of his power as a photographer was very great, and I was beginning to lose all hope that I was going to get this beautiful work out there."
--Barbara Villet, Grey's widow

"Villet shot for LIFE in both its weekly and reinvented monthly iterations between 1955 and 1985, producing some 40 full-length features of remarkable emotional and intellectual range—from a 1962 visit inside Synanon House, a controversial drug-treatment facility in California, to "The Lash of Success," an allegorical look at a Chicago furniture-chain owner whose abuse of power ultimately destroyed what he'd built. His mid-'70s essay about a hospital nurse, "More Than Compassion," like W. Eugene Smith's "Country Doctor," is a striking examination of life and death. Yet Smith's 1948 essay is legendary, and Villet's is hardly known."

"Grey was able to tell a story about something people necessarily hadn't gotten their minds around," said David Friend, who worked with Villet at LIFE as a reporter and picture editor. "It's not necessarily about [Henri] Cartier-Bresson's 'decisive moment'; it's about the collision or dovetailing of images that add up to a greater whole."

Among his own kind," Mr. Friend said of his former colleague, "he was revered."

"His work is every bit as important as those who were so well known," said Sidney Monroe, whose Santa Fe-based gallery represents Villet's estate."

Full article here.
(Subscription required)

Wall Street Journal slide show
(No subscription required to view)

Wall Street Journal Interactive: Watching and Listening: The Work of Photojournalist Grey Villet
View Grey Villet's photographs during the AIPAD Photography Show March 28 - April 1 at Monroe Gallery of Photography Booth #419.

Remembering ICP's Founder Cornell Capa today on the anniversary of his death

Cornell Capa by Alfred Eisenstaedt

"The idea that photography can't be personal is madness!...I see something, it goes through my eye, brain, heart, guts. I choose the subject. What could be more personal than that?" -- Cornell Capa (April 10, 1918 – May 23, 2008)

Via Magnum Photos

Accomplished Magnum photographer Cornell Capa passed away early on the morning of May 23rd at home in New York.


Cornell Capa was born Cornell Friedmann to a Jewish family in Budapest. In 1936 he moved to Paris, where his brother Andre (Robert Capa) was working as a photojournalist. He worked as his brother's printer until 1937, then moved to New York to join the new Pix photo agency. In 1938 he began working in the Life darkroom. Soon his first photo-story - on the New York World's Fair - was published in Picture Post.

In 1946, after serving in the US Air Force, Cornell became a Life staff photographer. After his brother's death in 1954, he joined Magnum, and when David 'Chim' Seymour died in Suez in 1956 Capa took over as president of Magnum, a post he held until 1960.

Capa made an empathetic, pioneering study of mentally retarded children in 1954, and covered other social issues, such as old age in America. He also explored his own religious tradition. While working for Life, Capa made the first of several Latin American trips. These continued through the 1970s and culminated in three books, among them Farewell to Eden (1964), a study of the destruction of indigenous Amazon cultures.

Capa covered the electoral campaigns of John and Robert Kennedy, Adlai Stevenson and Nelson Rockefeller, among others. His 1969 book, New Breed on Wall Street, was a landmark study of a generation of ruthless young entrepreneurs keen on making money and spending it fast.

In 1974 Capa founded New York City's influential International Center of Photography, to which for many years he dedicated much of his considerable energy as its director.

Robert Capa's Mexican Suitcase to reveal its secrets in New York exhibition

The International Center of Photography is getting ready for "a historical revelation", as it unveils plans to put on show the contents of the Mexican Suitcase - a newly-found collection of images by Robert Capa, David Seymour and Gerda Taro .

©British Journal of Photography
July 22, 2010
by Olivier Laurent

The 'Mexican Suitcase' - actually three cardboard boxes of negatives - was discovered in 1995 and released to the International Center of Photography in January 2008 after years of secret negotiations with the descendants of a Mexican general who found the work. (See the aticle and slide show here.)

The boxes contained more than 4500 negatives of images shot by Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and Davic "Chim" Seymour. The images were long-feared to be lost after the negatives were left in Capa's studio in Paris when he fled France during the Second World War.

Last year, in an interview with BJP, Cynthia Young, an assistant curator at the ICP said that the suitcase contained "46 Chim rolls, 45 Capa rolls, 32 Taro rolls and three attributed to Capa and Taro, as well as two rolls by Fred Stein." The 4500 images were taken between May 1936 and March 1939, and most of them are from the Spanish Civil War, with the exception of two rolls from Capa's trip to Belgium in May 1939.

And, from September, after two years of scanning and cataloging, visitors will be able to get access to some of the most iconic images as the ICP opens its first Mexican Suitcase exhibition.

The exhibition opens on 24 September and will run for more than three months. "Capa, Chim, and Taro risked their lives to witness history in the making and showing it to the world, and the Mexican Suitcase contains some of their most important works," says the ICP. "The Mexican Suitcase marks a profound shift in the study of these three photographers. In the process of researching the negatives of both major events and mundane details of the war, the authorship of numerous images by Capa, Chim and Taro has been confirmed or reattributed.

"This material not only provides a uniquely rich and panoramic scope of the Spanish Civil War, a conflict that changed the course of European history, but it also demonstrates how the work of these legendary photographers laid the foundation for modern war photography."

The ICP adds: "Equally compelling are the stories of the photographers themselves as revealed through these images: the dashing Capa, the studious Chim, and the intrepid Taro, who died tragically in 1937, during the battle of Brunete."

The Mexican Suitcase exhibition will also include vintage 1930s newspapers and magazines - such as egards, Vu, Life, Schweizer Illustrierte Zeitung, Volks-Illustrierte - in which the images first appeared, providing "an enlightening historical context for the evolving coverage of the war and the growing reliance on the photo essay," says the Center.

To coincide with the exhibition, Steidl, in collaboration with the ICP, will release "a fully-illustrated two-volume catalogue," in which all the negatives in the suitcase will be thoroughly reproduced and accompanied by essays from twenty-one specialists in Spanish Civil War and 1930’s photography."

For more information, visit http://www.icp.org./

IRVING HABERMAN ARCHIVE OF VINTAGE PRINTS REPRESENTED BY MONROE GALLERY

Marlene Dietrich passionately kissing a GI as he arrives home from World War II, New York, 1945

Monroe Gallery of Photography is extremely pleased to announce it is representing the Irving Haberman Photo Collection of vintage prints. The Irving Haberman Photo Collection was formed in 2009 by Michael Tarter, the grandson of award-winning photographer Irving Haberman.  Now, for the very first time, Haberman's treasured vintage prints are available to collectors.

Born in the Bronx, New York, on June 1, 1916, Irving Haberman became one of the preeminent news photographers of the 20th century. During an illustrious career that spanned nearly 50 years (1936-1985), including 35 years at CBS, Haberman liked to say he “shot ‘em all”, and that he did. With a breadth of work astonishing for just one man, his collection features more than 10,000 negatives and vintage prints, covering some of the most celebrated personalities and defining moments of his era, together with the struggles, aspirations, and triumphs of ordinary people. In recognition of his work, Haberman won more than 70 awards, including Photographer of the Year (1969) and a Lifetime Achievement Award (1991), both from the prestigious New York Press Photographers Association.

In 1995, Haberman celebrated the publication of "Eyes on an Era: 4 Decades of Photojournalism by Irving Haberman" by Rizzoli, which featured commentary from his dear friend and former CBS colleague, Walter Cronkite. Mike Wallace, another friend and colleague who attended the opening night exhibition of Haberman’s work at the International Center of Photography in New York noted at the time, “Irving Haberman had the gift of friendship, which lured the folks whose pictures he shot to give him their best. In return, he gave them vivid and evocative pictures.”

Haberman became friends with many of the celebrities and newsmakers he shot over the years, but it was always his family that mattered most. He was married for 60 years to his wife Beulah, before her passing in 2001. Haberman passed away March 25, 2003 at the age of 86. He is survived by two daughters and four grandchildren.


Haberman's career highlights included:

The Brooklyn Eagle (1936 - 1939)
One-Man Photo Syndicate Based in Brooklyn, New York (1939 - 1941)
Newspaper PM/New York Star (1941 - 1949)
CBS (1949 - 1968)
Richard Nixon's Official Campaign Photographer (1968)
CBS (1969 - 1985)

See selections of currently available vintage prints here. Also visit the homepage of the Irving Haberman Photo Collection here.