"You are the most popular, biggest photo blog out there"

"I care about the situation of human begins in the world and so I’m sometimes attracted to stories that I think are important socially that are particularly under covered. I think photography can inform people. I’m not saying it can change the world, but I think it can inform people and so that’s also something I will take into account."

A Conversation with Jim Estrin, New York Times Lens Blog via Burn magazine.

Open Society Foundation Moving Walls 2013 Exhibit Announced

Kim Jeong-Ya (a pseudonym), 67, lives in China near the North Korean border and belongs to a handful of Chinese human rights activists who dedicate their lives to help both North Korean defectors and abducted South Koreans make a safe passage from North Korea to South Korea via mainland China.

Photo credit: © Katharina Hesse

Via Open Society Foundation

2013 will mark a milestone for the Open Society Foundations’ Moving Walls exhibition. It will not only be our 20th exhibition since starting in 1998 but will be the inaugural exhibition at the Foundations’ new headquarters at the Argonaut building on 57th and Broadway in New York City. Moving Walls is a documentary photography exhibition produced by the Open Society Foundations that features in-depth explorations of human rights and social issues. These images provide human rights evidence, put faces onto a conflict, document the struggles and defiance of marginalized people, reframe how issues are discussed publicly, and provide opportunities for reflection and discussion. Since 1998, Moving Walls has featured over 150 photographers.

For the exhibition that will open in our new office, we received 300 proposals from 49 countries through an open call. The proposals were carefully reviewed by the Documentary Photography Project staff, an advisory committee of foundation staff, and the show’s longtime curators, Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas and Stuart Alexander, International Specialist at Christies. We recently completed selection and are pleased to announce that the following photographers have been chosen:

• Katharina Hesse, on North Korean refugees who crossed the border into China
• Fernando Moleres, on young men and boys imprisoned alongside adults and awaiting trial in Sierra Leone
• Yuri Kozyrev, on the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa and their aftermath
• Ian Teh, on the changing landscape of the Yellow River Basin in China
• Donald Weber, on police interrogations in Ukraine

In contrast to our current location, the new exhibition space will be located on the street level in a public conference space. That, combined with being more centrally located on 57th Street, gives us opportunities to engage with the public in a different way. The current office has been a great home to Moving Walls but I am excited for the new possibilities. Stay tuned for more information as we get closer to the opening of the exhibition.



Related: People Get Ready: The Struggle for Human Rights exhibition

The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League, 1936-1951

The Photo League students take their camera anywhere . . . they want to tell us about New York and some of the people who live there . . . there was almost a sense of desperation in the desire to convey messages of sociological import.”
Beaumont Newhall, 1948

Via The Jewish Museum
In 1936 a group of young, idealistic photographers, most of them Jewish, first-generation Americans, formed an organization in Manhattan called the Photo League. Their solidarity centered on a belief in the expressive power of the documentary photograph and on a progressive alliance in the 1930s of socialist ideas and art. The Radical Camera presents the contested path of the documentary photograph during a tumultuous period that spanned the New Deal reforms of the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War.

Sid Grossman, Coney Island, c. 1947



Jerome Liebling, Butterfly Boy,
New York, 1949

Photographing the City
Members rejected the prevailing style of modernism in order to engage the gritty realities of urban life. Leaguers focused on New York, and this meant looking closely at ordinary people. That impulse spurred the group to explore neighborhoods, street by street, camera at the ready.

The League and Its Legacy
A unique complex of school, darkroom, gallery, and salon, the League was also a place where you learned about yourself. One of its leading members was Sid Grossman who pushed students to discover not only the meaning of their work but also their relationship to it. This transformative approach was one of the League’s most innovative and influential contributions to the medium. By its demise in 1951, the League had propelled documentary photography from factual images to more challenging ones--from bearing witness to questioning one’s own bearings in the world.

Mason Klein
Curator, The Jewish Museum, New York

Catherine Evans
Curator, Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio

Jack Manning (American, 1920-2001)
Elks Parade, 1939, from Harlem Document, 1936–40
Gelatin silver print
10 1/16 x 13 in. (25.6 x 33 cm)
The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund, 2008-95
© Estate of Jack Manning


Sid Grossman (American, 1913-1955)
Coney Island, c. 1947
Gelatin silver print
9 3/8 x 7 7/8 in. (23.8 x 20 cm)
The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: The Paul Strand Trust for the benefit of Virginia Stevens Gift, 2008-62
© Howard Greenberg Gallery, NYC

Jerome Liebling (American, 1924-2011)
Butterfly Boy, New York, 1949
Gelatin silver print
9 1/2 x 9 1/2 in. (24.1 x 24.1 cm)
The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: Mimi and Barry J. Alperin Fund, 2008-90



The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League, 1936-1951 has been organized by The Jewish Museum, New York and the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio.

The exhibition is made possible by a major grant from the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation, with generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts and Betsy Karel.

The exhibit opens November 4, and runs through March 25, 2012 and will then travel to the Columbus Museum of Art, the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, and the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida.

See related article here

See related slideshow here

Ida Wyman's photographs are included in the exhibition

Ruth Orkin's photographs are included in the exhibition

An Enduring Aftermath: An Interview with Nina Berman, Documentary Photographer

Posted on October 4, 2011 by 10yearsandcounting

Minneapolis curator and arts writer Tricia Khutoretsky interviews photographer Nina Berman for 10 Years + Counting. Nina begun taking photographs 10 years ago, and has since been working on ongoing documentation of America since the invasion of Afghanistan

Photographs are often a glimpse into the past, a way to remember and a way to record. Nina Berman’s award-winning and internationally exhibited documentary photographs however seem to hold a sort of timelessness. Perhaps this is because many of the images she captures are of our country changed by a war that is equally endless. From the legacy left on war veteran’s bodies and minds, to images taken in Afghanistan pre-invasion, or her exploration into America’s troubling ideological landscape… her photographs attempt to understand subjects that she feels personally curious about. That genuine search for deeper insight translates visually in a way that is memorable and provoking. In the following interview, Nina and I converse about the coinciding 10 year anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan and the stories and motivations behind her decade long study of a nation at war.

Full interview here.

"I have no words for what I saw there"

Kaho Imai, Watanoha Elementary School

By eyecurious

Published: 15 June 2011
 
After the earthquake and subsequent tsunami struck the Tohoku region of region on 11 March 2011, the photographer Aichi Hirano decided to distribute 50 disposable cameras to the people in the shelters around Ishinomaki. He succeeded in retrieving 27 of these 50 cameras and subsequently published the results on a website created for the project http://www.rolls7.com/ This is a piece I wrote about the Rolls Tohoku project. It was first published in Foam magazine issue #27, ‘Report’, which has just been released (the issue is really an fascinating exploration of what reporting means in photography today… don’t miss it). This summer the museum of photography in Stockholm, Fotografiska, will be exhibiting the Rolls Tohoku project from 7 July to 28 August. Rolls had a deep impact on me (as you will see from the following) and I urge you to take the time to spend some time looking at these photographs.

Japan lives with the constant threat of natural disasters. Located in a highly unstable sector of the Pacific Ring of Fire, it experiences hundreds, if not thousands of earthquakes every year and has become the best-prepared country in the world for quakes and the tsunamis which can follow. But nothing could have prepared the population for the gigantic quake and tsunami that devastated the Tohoku region of north-eastern Japan.

The earthquake and tsunami of 11 March 2011 was very likely the most highly-mediatized natural disaster ever. Although a large tsunami hit parts of Southeast Asia in 2004, very few images emerged of the brief moments of impact of the tsunami, but rather of the destruction that it left behind. Amateur footage was released in Japan shortly after the quake and within minutes the Japanese national broadcaster NHK sent helicopters out in anticipation of the tsunami that was expected to hit the Tohoku coastline. The resulting images showed the black wave swallowing everything in its path. Over the next few hours more footage was released, most of it shot by amateurs, showing the impact of the wave up and down the Tohoku coast. The spellbinding images, which played back on television and computer screens around the world, captured the brutal power and relentlessness of the tsunami. Some of the footage was also imbued with an eerie sense of dread as houses and cars floated down streets that had been full of activity just a few minutes before. The scale of the devastation quickly became apparent and, although the number of confirmed deaths was initially low, the images suggested that a huge death toll was inevitable.

Yet, within days the situation in Tohoku had all but disappeared from the international media as the troubling developments at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant began to monopolize the headlines. The towns of Minami Sanriku, Ishinomaki, Miyagi and Sendai that had been the center of attention until then receded into the shadow of Fukushima. A little over a week after the quake, I picked up a free newspaper on the Paris metro. The cover was a photograph of the Eiffel Tower on a hazy day, presumably taken weeks or months before. The headline read, ‘The Radioactive Cloud Arrives in France.’ The story had shifted from the tragedy that had befallen the people of Tohoku to the fear of what might happen to ‘us’. Within a week potassium iodide tablets had sold out as far away as Finland and the United States. Words like ‘meltdown’ or ‘radiation’ are so charged with meaning composited from science fiction and the very real horrors of Chernobyl or the fall-out from the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that there was little space left in the collective imagination for scientific fact. As a narrative, the nuclear threat was infinitely more powerful: this was no longer just another tale of people’s suffering somewhere on the other side of the globe, but an invisible and very personal threat to each and every one of us.

Masaki Abe, Shidukawa Elementary School

Although, I have never lived in Japan I have visited the country regularly in recent years. My involvement with Japanese photography somehow made the events of 11 March feel deeply personal. In the days following the disaster I watched the news obsessively, hungry for any information at all, but finding very little. In the era of the 24-hour news cycle, information and stories are constantly recycled and updated, as the same images, the same tiny scraps of information get repeated over and over every hour. It was not until I heard the personal stories, of friends—a dear friend trapped in a bullet train in a freezing, pitch-black tunnel for over 24 hours and then travelling for two days to get back home, another who lost his mother to the giant wave and whose native town was totally destroyed—or indeed strangers—an 80-year-old woman and her grandson who survived together for nine days after the quake and who, when asked what he would like to be when he is older, replied ‘an artist’—that I was able to get beyond the huge, abstract idea of a natural disaster. As with these stories, the photographs in the Rolls project were the first that I saw that went beyond the surface of this tragic event.

When the earthquake hit on 11 March, a young photographer, Aichi Hirano, was showing his work in an exhibition entitled Rolls of One Week. Hirano explains, ‘At that time, I felt so powerless, being in the same country yet unable to do anything to reach out and help directly.’ To combat his sense of helplessness, he decided to distribute fifty disposable cameras to survivors displaced by the tsunami who had been evacuated to shelters in Ishinomaki, Miyagi prefecture. Hirano provided some loose directions on sheets of paper: ‘Please take photos of things you see with your eyes, things you want to record, remember, people near you, your loved ones, things you want to convey… please do so freely. And please enjoy the process if you can, even if it’s just a little bit.’ Of the 50 cameras he distributed, Hirano was able to retrieve 27, which he uploaded in their entirety to the website http://www.rolls7.com/

Anonymous, around Ishinomaki

Until Rolls, most of the images emerging from the Tohoku region focused on the spectacular devastation caused by the tsunami – cars piled on top of houses, forests of debris where villages had once stood. In the face of disaster, when we cannot believe our eyes, photography has often been used to fill that breach: to provide a visual record that captures events so shocking or spectacular that they are impossible to digest. Perhaps the most powerful recent examples were taken from satellites. Several news websites created an interactive display superimposing a satellite image taken on 12 March over an image taken some time before the tsunami. By swiping across the image the user shifts between before and after, revealing the huge areas of land that had been wiped clean by the wave. Although images like these are undeniably powerful, they have a strangely impersonal quality. They provide a macro perspective of the disaster, a kind of quantification of the scale of the devastation, but one which gives us no insight into the individual lives of those affected. By contrast, Rolls offers a deeply personal vision of the disaster from the perspective of those who have been directly affected. These images do not just show the pain and suffering of the victims, but also their joy, their relief and even the boredom and tedium that they experience as they seek to pass the time in their evacuation shelters.

For each roll we know only the photographer’s name, sex and whether they are an adult or a child. But perhaps it is wrong to use the term ‘photographer’. The very point of these images is that they were taken by amateurs. In contrast to the spectacle of the images that appear in the press, there is little that is at all remarkable about these photographs. In one roll a boy has photographed his stuffed toys one by one on a mat. In another (anonymous) roll, a donkey appears tied to a tree that is just beginning to blossom. The rolls are made up of small fragments like these which we cannot understand beyond the knowledge that they are parts of individuals’ lives, details which to them seemed important enough to photograph. They do not employ the visual language of photo-reportage or of fine art photography to convey a specific message. Their quiet, artless, unselfconscious quality makes these images all the more powerful, investing them with the directness of words spoken by a young child. Although images of destruction are also present, it is not the subject of the photographs, but instead a visual backdrop to the ordinary details of these people’s lives. In one roll such images appear as blurry glimpses from the window of a moving car, as if the reality of the destruction had yet to sink in.

Hirano’s exhortation to the survivors to ‘enjoy the process if you can’ can be seen in the shots, particularly those taken by children. We see laughter, friendship, play – elements that do not appear in conventional images of disaster, but which provide a fuller picture of the reality of life in its aftermath. These are not photographs of what has happened to these people or images that construct a narrative that seeks to make the disaster understandable. Instead, they form a part of people’s ongoing struggle to digest and comprehend what they have experienced and, more simply, of the need to carry on with their lives.

Masahiro Yamada, Ishinomaki day-care center

During my short visit to Japan in early April a powerful aftershock struck the Miyagi region. At the time, I was with a friend in a bar in Tokyo, after having been to yozakura, the tradition of viewing the cherry blossoms by night. This was my first experience of an earthquake: the entire room swayed back and forth for a few seconds before the shock subsided. Although everyone stayed calm, not moving from their seats, the recent events made the tension palpable. We spent the next minutes anxiously watching television for news from Miyagi. My friend was aware of the damage this aftershock would cause, particularly as she was due to visit the area soon afterwards. A few days later I received a message in which she wrote, “I have no words for what I saw there.” This failure of words has its parallel in photography: rarely do images effectively describe an event of this magnitude. These rolls of film from Tohoku come closer than anything else I have seen yet.

Photographic hep for Japan

Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare

 Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle

PHOTOGRAPHY

How Photography Shifted the Balance of the Civil Rights Movement

Via Gizmodo

Leigh Raiford — Twitter and Facebook may be the civil uprising tools du jour, but they certainly weren't the first. Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare discusses how photography helped bring Southern brutalities to light and sustained the African American Civil Rights movement.

Figure i.1. (above) - Firemen blast protestors with high-pressure hoses, corner of Fifth Ave. North and 17th Street, Birmingham, Alabama, May 3, 1963. Photograph by Charles Moore. (Charles Moore/Black Star)

For nearly two weeks in early May of 1963, national and international audiences rose each morning to images of violence, confrontation, and resistance splashed across the front pages of their major newspapers. Black-and-white photographs paraded daily through the New York Times and the Washington Post depicted white police officers in Birmingham, Alabama, wielding high-powered fire hoses and training police dogs on nonviolent black and often very young protesters (figures i.1, i.2). Organized by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), "Project C" (for "confrontation") brought center stage the publicly unacknowledged terror, violence, and daily inequities African Americans had long suffered at the hands of white southerners. Through forced confrontations between blacks and whites, between constitutional right and segregationist practice, between the genteel, progressive image of the New South and the dehumanizing Old South reality, the thousands of men, women, and children who participated in Project C confronted a watching world with the contradictions of contemporary southern race relations. They vividly and visually challenged an entire economic and social regime of power.

A year later, SCLC's leader, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., recognized the importance of such vivid imagery in galvanizing support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. King wrote of the campaign in his book Why We Can't Wait, "The brutality with which officials would have quelled the black individual became impotent when it could not be pursued with stealth and remain unobserved. It was caught - as a fugitive from a penitentiary is often caught - in gigantic circling spotlights. It was imprisoned in a luminous glare revealing the naked truth to the whole world." For King, the visual media proved a crucial component in capturing "fugitive" brutality, holding it still for scrutiny and transmitting this "naked truth" to watching and judging audiences.

Figure i.2. - William Gadsen attacked by police dogs in front of 16th Street Baptist Church, during a nonviolent protest, Birmingham, Alabama, May 3, 1963. Photograph by Bill Hudson (AP Photos/Bill Hudson)

  

King praises photography and film for their work of exposure, revealing through mechanical reproduction facts that had remained hidden and therefore difficult to prove. By the time King penned Why We Can't Wait, he had witnessed, deployed, and been the subject of photographs of movement events both spectacular and quotidian. He believed deeply in their power to image African Americans as U.S. citizens who, like their white counterparts, were deserving of equal treatment. Images of the broken body of Emmett Till, of whites' abuse of four African American North Carolina A&T students sitting in at a Greensboro Woolworth's lunch counter, of baseball bats and firebombs that greeted Freedom Riders in Mississippi and Alabama bus stations each reveal how vulnerable African Americans were when demonstrating for the most basic and fundamental of rights. They laid bare to nonblack audiences what African Americans of the Jim Crow era had long known, seen, and experienced. With bright enough lights and an army of cameras trained in the right direction, images were central to changing public opinion about the violent entrenchment of white supremacy in the South and that system's overdetermination of black life and possibility. The visual proved a tool as effective as bus boycotts and as righteous as nonviolence.


But white violence and black resistance are not the only captives imprisoned within the camera's luminous glare and vigilant eye. For many viewers today, almost the entirety of the civil rights movement is captured, quite literally, in the photographs of Birmingham 1963. These images have shaped and informed the ways scholars, politicians, artists, and everyday people recount, remember, and memorialize the 1960s freedom struggle specifically and movement histories generally. The use and repetition of movement photographs in contexts as varied as electoral campaigns, art exhibits, commercials, and, of course, academic histories have crystallized many of these photographs into icons, images that come to distill and symbolize a range of complex events and ideologies. These icons, in turn, become integral to processes of national, racial, and political identity formation. Even as these photographs mark movement participants' attempts to rewrite the meaning of black bodies in public space, the photographs also imprison - frame and "iconize" - images of legitimate leadership, appropriate forms of political action, and the proper place of African Americans within the national imaginary. The repeated use of many of the more recognizable photographs of African American social movements has had a "surplus symbolic value" in the work of constructing and reconstructing our collective histories. And they become guides to appropriate forms of future political action. Photographs become tools to aid memory. We are invited, expected, even demanded to recount and memorialize. To remember. But what exactly are we being asked to remember? How are we being asked to remember? And to what end?

King's apt phrase "imprisoned in a luminous glare" as metaphor for the work of the camera in African American social movements alerts us to the dialectical relationships between mass media and mass movements, photography and race, history and memory. It also suggests the tensions between captivity and fugitivity, the contradictions inherent in attempting to fix that which by its nature is mobile and mercurial. It calls attention to how mass media attempt to capture mass movements, photography tries to name and regulate "race," and history works to tame memory. The photograph in particular imposes a unitary vision and helps fix the meaning of that which it records. It provides the illusion of seeing an event in its entirety as it truly happened.

Figure i.3 - Crowd watches Birmingham protests; Birmingham, Alabama, May 3, 1963. Photograph by Charles Moore. (Charles Moore/Black Star

  

Just as Project C has become a touchstone of the civil rights movement, the photographs themselves have come to epitomize the power of photography in this moment. Even photographs as compelling as these cannot tell the whole story, cannot imprison all. One method of reading images would have us turn to the blurry figures appearing at the edges of the Project C photographs, Birmingham's other black youths (figure i.3). Not so properly attired or as well-behaved, these young, poor men and women refused to participate in the nonviolent actions that captured the world's attention.


They were less interested in the desegregation of public spaces than in economic equity. In the photographs we might catch them with their arms folded, intransigent witnesses. But outside the picture's frame they threw bottles and shouted obscenities at Bull Connor's police force. Subsequently, they were disciplined by the Birmingham police, by the organizers of Project C, and by the photographic frame that excised them from the documentary evidence of those events. The now-iconic photographs from Birmingham 1963, as noted by King, imprison Jim Crow order; yet what remains elusive in this framing is the expansive expressions of black political desire, constantly changing and evolving over the course of the twentieth century.

From IMPRISONED IN A LUMINOUS GLARE: PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE AFRICAN AMERICAN FREEDOM STRUGGLE by Leigh Raiford. Copyright © 2011 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher. www.uncpress.unc.edu


Leigh Raiford is associate professor of African American studies at the University of California, Berkeley.


Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle is available from the University of North Carolina Press and Amazon.com

 

Related: A CIVIL RIGHTS LEGACY: "NESHOBA: THE PRICE OF FREEDOM"

American Modern: Abbott, Evans, Bourke-White

THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO
February 5–May 15, 2011


Galleries 1–4

Overview: In the 1930s, photographers pushed the genre of documentary photography to the forefront of public culture in the United States and onto the walls of newly opened museums and art galleries. That historic development receives new insight with this exhibition focusing exclusively on the work of American photographers Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans, and Margaret Bourke-White.

 

 Walker Evans. Posed Portraits, New York, 1932. The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Mrs. James Ward Thorne. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.



Photographic activity flourished in America in the 1930s during the Great Depression, and the genre of documentary emerged as a mode of understanding contemporary events. While the world was in a turbulent state—national and international economies were being severely tested, political systems were in flux, and Europe was preparing again for war—Americans recognized their own viable cultural heritage and sought to record and expand that heritage. Indeed, the country’s literary, artistic, and architectural traditions were fortified in the period’s explosion of popular literature, the founding of new art museums, and the establishment of New Deal government-funded arts programs.

At the same time, advances in technology, production, and distribution transformed mass media in this country: Americans enjoyed weekly picture magazines, radio broadcasts, and popular movies in unprecedented numbers. Photography played an especially critical role in contemporary culture, appearing in books, newspapers, and magazines as well as being accorded exhibitions in art museums and galleries. Photographs crossed the boundaries between public and private use, impersonal documentation and expressive creation, and popular visual culture and fine art.

American Modern examines the practice of documentary photography through the work of three of the most important photographers of the decade, each of whom contributed a fundamental, independent, and novel idea about documentary to the common pool of artistic practice. For Abbott, it was the notion that photography was a means of critical dialogue and communication. Evans thoroughly investigated the idea that photography has a unique and essential relationship to time. And Bourke-White’s documentary practice fused the logic and pageantry of modern industry with the drama and individual narratives of its subjects.

Catalogue: A lavishly illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition.

Sponsor:

This exhibition is co-organized by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, and the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine.

The exhibition and accompanying publication have been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation for the Arts, and the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.

Support for the Chicago presentation of this exhibition is generously provided in part by the Terra Foundation for American Art.

Generous support is provided by members of the Exhibitions Trust: Kenneth and Anne Griffin, Thomas and Margot Pritzker, the Earl and Brenda Shapiro Foundation, Donna and Howard Stone, Mr. and Mrs. Paul Sullivan, and an anonymous donor