LIFE photographers: "He or she needs to bring empathy, insight, patience and frequently courage"

America in Pictures: The Story of Life Magazine, BBC Four
How the camera captured America's golden age
Via The Arts Desk

by Adam Sweeting  Friday, 02 December 2011


Before the internet and the Kindle were invented, generations of Americans saw their lives refracted through the pages of Life magazine. In particular, through its photography, since writers at Life were largely relegated to supplying glorified picture captions. They were also allowed to carry the photographers' equipment.

Obviously the idea of being an object of reverence appeals to photographers. Portrait and fashion snapper Rankin has long admired the work of the great Life lenspersons, and in this film he reviewed their accomplishments and tracked down some of the magazine's fabled survivors. Not that Rankin is the world's greatest TV presenter, frankly. His voice is the sort of nondescript Home Counties drone that American satirists love to parody. As an inquisitor, he looked a bit blank when he found himself face to face with the likes of Burk Uzzle, now retired to small-town North Carolina after a vivid career in which one of many highlights was being assigned to document Hugh Hefner and his voluptuous Playmates at Hef's mansion.

Luckily, though, most of his subjects were rather awesome characters who had no difficulty in filling the screen unaided (Life photographer Bill Eppridge, pictured right). Indeed, this seemed to be rather the point - a photographer isn't, or shouldn't be, just some geek who knows how to work a camera and programme an array of electronic flashguns. He or she needs to bring empathy, insight, patience and frequently courage to an assignment if they're going to bring back anything that will resonate with readers.

Amid a mostly male roll call, Margaret Bourke-White inevitably stood out, not only because she was a fabulous photographer, but also for the way she candidly used her sexuality to gain maximum professional advantage. A highly successful tactic was bedding American generals in order to get priceless wartime scoops. A rival lensman was chastised by Life HQ because she was beating him to the best stories. He cabled back: "Bourke-White has a piece of equipment that I don't have."

But there were many other stars in the dazzling Life firmament. Alfred Eisenstaedt (pictured left with Marilyn Monroe) was the magazine's grand eminence, and a pioneer of the "candid" style in which he used a Rolleiflex camera held unobtrusively at waist level. W Eugene Smith did pioneering work in the photo-essay genre, gaining extraordinarily intimate access to his subjects in stories like "Career Girl" or "Country Doctor". Rankin noted that "Smith was a tortured genius, Life's Van Gogh." John Loengard shot Marilyn Monroe, The Beatles and the Vietnam War.

Life became so singular and influential during the mid-20th century, when 100 million readers would see it every week, that the question inevitably arose of to what extent the magazine was making the news rather than merely recording it. John Shearer's assignments covering the Civil Rights protests in the 1960s became a part of the fabric of social change, as did his astonishing work during the 1971 Attica prison riot. Shearer spent four days inside the jail as a ferocious miniature war raged, leaving 41 men dead.

Life took a dim view of the Vietnam conflict and ignored demands to tone down its frequently shattering battlefield photographs. British photographer Larry Burrows (seen in clips from a 1969 Omnibus film) talked about his concerns that he was exploiting wartime deaths and suffering, but felt his pictures were justified if they "contribute to the understanding of what others were going through". He was killed in Laos in 1971 (Larry Burrows, pictured right).

Rankin reckoned that it was the arrival of celebrity culture in the 1970s which pulled the carpet out from underneath Life, which published its last issue in December 1972. Celebs were going to rule, and the intimate, deeply researched work that Life had specialised in would become outmoded. Glaswegian snapper Harry Benson, a transplanted Daily Express veteran, was in at the death of Life, and famously became the man who gained access to mad chess genius Bobby Fischer as he played his epic tournament against Boris Spassky in Iceland. The recent documentary Bobby Fischer Against the World gave the impression that Benson had become friendly with Fischer, but the photographer didn't see it that way.

"Everyone knew he was a piece of shit, he was terrible!" he declared. "But it was worth fighting for, to get as close as you can and then get out." He never, ever wanted to become friends with any of his subjects, he added. Photography was apparently no mere popularity contest.

For the Record: Searching for Objectivity in Global Conflict

Stealth Bomber, Atlantic City, New Jersey, 2007 ©Nina Berman

Via Montserrat College of Art

Bombarded by information from a variety of sources, it is often difficult as observers of current affairs to fully make sense of the concepts and facts presented. Artists offer us the opportunity to engage and interpret this information in an alternative way. They were the first compelled to record and present the events of the world. Artists illustrate and record many aspects of war in a variety of ways, whether through genuine factual representation (witness accounts of war) through war reportage drawing and/or documentary work or as artistic interpretation (visual response to war). The artists in For The Record offer a testament of the effects of war and conflict on people, societies and the physical earth.

For the Record Symposium This Weekend, September 30 and Saturday, October 1:

A two-day symposium highlighting the Montserrat Gallery exhibit, "For the Record" will open Friday, Sept. 30 with panel discussions with veterans, talks by artists and writers, a showing of Sebastian Junger's film, "Restrepo" and a keynote address by American art critic, curator and Dean of the Yale School of Art Robert Storr.

The exhibition, curated by Montserrat faculty members artist Rob Roy and social historian and author Gordon Arnold, along with Gallery Director Leonie Bradbury, came in part from a 30-year conversation between the two faculty on the topic of conflict, how it is interpreted, and leaving the viewer to draw their own conclusions.

The symposium activities are free and open to the public, but registration is requested.

WHEN Friday, September 30 and Saturday, October 1, 2011.
WHERE Montserrat Campus and various surrounding venues
Cost Free: Registration is required. CLICK HERE TO REGISTER
Contact Leonie Bradbury leonie.bradbury@montserrat.edu

Friday, Sept. 30

Dane Street Church, 10 Dane Street, Beverly, MA
7:30 pm
Symposium Welcome
7:45 pm
Awarding of an Honorary Docorate to Keynote Speaker Robert Storr, Dean of the Yale School of Art
8 - 9 pm
KEY NOTE SPEECH by Robert Storr
Topic: Gerhard Richter September by Robert Storr American curator, academic, critic, and painter.

Saturday, Oct. 1
Dane Street Church, 10 Dane Street, Beverly, MA
9:00am
Symposium welcome with coffee
9:30 am
AUTHOR TALK Susanne Slavick
Topic: OUT OF RUBBLE, an anthology of artists responding to the aftermath of war by Susanne Slavick, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. She will discuss a selection from nearly 40 international artists who consider the causes and consequences of rubble, its finality and future, moving from decimation and disintegration to the possibilities of regeneration and recovery. Approaching the 10th anniversary of our military engagement in Afghanistan and continuing conflict in Iraq, the book and related exhibits remain all too timely.
10:30am
ARTIST TALK Nina Berman
Topic: the American experience by Nina Berman a documentary photographer with a primary interest in the American political and social landscape. Her powerful images of wounded American veterans from the Iraq War are internationally known with recent exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art 2010 Biennial. She is the author of two monographs, Purple Hearts - Back from Iraq and Homeland.

11:30 am - 1 pm Break for lunch on your own

1 pm
LECTURE Steven Dubin, Ph.D.
Topic: Peace and Art, a lecture by arts and culture scholar Steven Dubin, Ph.D. Dubin has written and lectured widely on censorship, controversial exhibitions, the culture wars, popular culture, and mass media. He is interested in the intersection of culture and politics; the evolution of the arts from providing ideological support as well social resistance during South Africa's apartheid era, to becoming a force in building and critiquing democracy. He examines the interplay between the arts, ideology and power; the tension between creative freedom and social control; the arts as a vehicle of expression for otherwise socially marginalized people. Dubin will demonstrate how the visual and performing arts can also critique and thus challenge established social power.
2 pm
LECTURE Gordon Arnold, Ph.D., author and professor at Montserrat College of Art
Topic: Arnold will address how art, film, and other modes of cultural production reveal and probe the shape and scope of the overarching ideological system that informs much of contemporary American culture. Gordon Arnold, Ph.D. is an active scholar, writer and social historian who teaches courses in the social sciences and mass media at Montserrat College of Art.
2:30 pm
FILM SCREENING Restrepo by Sebastian Junger
Winner of the 2010 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize for documentary, Restrepo chronicles the deployment of a platoon of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley, one of the most dangerous postings in the U.S. military. The movie focuses on 15 soldiers based at Outpost Restrepo, named after a platoon medic killed early in the deployment. Filmed by author Sebastian Junger and award-winning photographer Tim Hetherington, Restrepo takes viewers on their own 90-minute deployment, without comment or agenda.
Co-director Tim Hetherington, an experienced photojournalist who reported on reported social and political conflict worldwide, was killed in fighting in Libya on April 20, 2011.
4 pm
PANEL DISCUSSION
Topic: Media Representations of Global Conflict moderated by Vietnam War Veteran Wayne Burton, President of the North Shore Community College. Panelists include: Steven Dubin, Montserrat Professors Gordon Arnold and Rob Roy; James O'Neill, Nina Berman, Susanne Slavick
5 - 6:30 pm
CLOSING RECEPTION
Location: Montserrat Gallery, Montserrat College of Art, 23 Essex St., Beverly(the college is a three minute walk from the Dane Street Church.)

“I was frustrated with photojournalism, and I was frustrated with society back in the U.S. being indifferent to the war”

Must Read, Must See: "Hell and Back Again" Afghanistan Documentary

Via The New York Times Lens PhotoBlog:

As the Afghan war neared a decade’s worth of combat, casualties and headlines, the photographer and filmmaker Danfung Dennis was looking to jolt people’s consciousness.

“I was frustrated with photojournalism, and I was frustrated with society back in the U.S. being indifferent to the war,” said Mr. Dennis, who had covered Afghanistan as a still photographer in 2006. “I moved into video and new media to try to shake people up — to show the war’s brutal reality in an honest way.”

Did he ever. “Hell and Back Again,”  his new award-winning documentary film about the war, is a tour de force that breaks new ground in the documentary tradition, combining chilling reportage with sometimes dreamy or drugged-up sequences. The film – with clinical precision – peels away the daily headlines to expose the reality of the Afghan war and the devastating burden carried by American service members back home.

Full post here with video.

The haunting power of old photographs

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.

BILL EPPRIDGE DOCUMENTARY TRAILER TO SCREEN

Maureen Muldaur's documentary proposal for "The Eye of The Storm" has been accepted into Westdoc, the the “go-to” conference for Documentary and Reality Filmmakers." The conference takes place in Santa Monica, California, September 13 - 15.


The Eye of the Storm tells the story of the assassination of Bobby Kennedy through the eyes of five photojournalists, four of whom were in the room when he was shot. The other was still in the Embassy Ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles where Bobby had just finished giving his victory speech for his win in the California Primary for President, a win that would probably take him to the White House.


Only these five photojournalists will tell the story of that night; we will experience an inherently dramatic event as it unfolds moment by moment. These five men will not only tell their personal stories as human beings but they will speak directly of that experience through being a photojournalist. Bobby was a man they had come to love and once he was shot, they had to bury their grief to perform the task at hand and chronicle a national tragedy. They had originally gone to the hotel to document a celebration but they had to use their skills instead to document one of the worst tragedies in American history.

The documentary will end when Bobby’s death was announced at 1:44am the next day at Good Samaritan Hospital.

The five photographers include:

Bill Eppridge of Life Magazine

Boris Yaro of The Los Angeles Times

Ron Bennett of UPI

David Kennerly of UPI

Richard Drew of the Pasadena Star News

Many of their photographs live on as icons of American History.

Muldaur Media filmed Bill Eppridge at the opening of  his exhibition "Bill Eppridge: An American Treasure" at Monroe Gallery of Photography, as well as in a lengthy interview over the July Fourth weekend. The exhibition continues through September 26.

STEVE SCHAPIRO: AMERICAN EDGE

Martin Luther King Jr, Alabama, 1965

Santa Fe--Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar, is honored to announce an extensive exhibition of more than 50 significant photographs by Steve Schapiro of events that would shape a generation, and people who were considered among the most dynamic of this past century. The exhibition opens with a reception for the photographer on Friday, April 16, from 5 to 7 PM, and will continue through June 27. View the exhibition on-line here.

Steve Schapiro discovered photography at age of nine at a summer camp. Excited by the camera's potential, he would spend the next decades prowling the streets of his native New York trying to emulate the work of the great French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. Schapiro was a disciple of the great photographer W. Eugene Smith, and shared Smith's passion for black and white documentary work. From the beginning of Schapiro’s career, he had already set a mission for himself: to chronicle the “American Life”. One of the most respected American documentary photographers, Steve Schapiro has photographed major stories for most of the world’s most prominent magazines, including Life, Look, Time, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone, People, and Paris Match.

Schapiro's photographs show the collective American psyche torn apart by the turbulent 1960's; the increasing disparity between rich and poor; racial and class conflict; the burgeoning middle class and its materialistic desires; in short, the American Edge.

Fifth Avenue, New York, 1961

His career in photography began in 1960 with personal documentary projects on "Arkansas Migrant Workers" and "Narcotics Addiction in East Harlem". The New York Times Magazine published his migrant photographs as a cover story which resulted in bringing electricity to a farm camp that previously had only kerosene lamps. In the 60's and 70's, he traveled extensively throughout the United States for Life and other magazines doing stories on American culture. Schapiro spent several weeks in the South with James Baldwin and became involved in many civil rights stories including the Selma March and covering Martin Luther King; he traveled with Bobby Kennedy on his Senate campaign and Presidential campaign (including a stop in Albuquerque); and did photo essays on Haight Ashbury, the Pine Ridge Sioux Indian Reservation, and Protest in America. He photographed Andy Warhol and the New York art scene, John and Jacqueline Kennedy, poodles, beauty parlors, and performances at the famous Apollo Theater in New York. He also collaborated on projects for record covers and related art.

As picture magazines declined in the 1970's and 80's he continued documentary work but also produced advertising material, publicity stills and posters for films, including, The Godfather, Rambo, The Way We Were, Risky Business, Taxi Driver, and Midnight Cowboy. From 2000 through 2003 he was a contributing photographer for American Radio Works (Minneapolis Public Radio) producing on-line documentary projects, including: “Viet Nam Vets,” “The Mentally Disturbed and the Prison System” and “Survivors of Jim Crow.”

Monographs include American Edge (2000), “Schapiro’s Heroes” (2007), "The Godfather Family Album - Photographs by Steve Schapiro" (2008); limited edition books of Chinatown and Taxi Driver will be published by Taschen in the near future.

Since the Metropolitan Museum of Art's seminal 1989 exhibition, "Harlem on my Mind", Schapiro's photographs have appeared in museum exhibitions world-wide, including the High Museum of Art's "Road to Freedom", currently on exhibit at the Bronx Museum and travelling the United States.

Supermarket Protest, New Jesery, 1963