Mark Peterson is on the ground, capturing the scene in Milwaukee for New York Magazine

 Via New York Magazine

July 15 

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Queens, New York: lunch with the Maestro. Tony Vaccaro photographed by Ashley Gilbertson

 

Via Instagram

June 1, 2022

Queens, New York: lunch with the Maestro. Tony Vaccaro photographed by Ashley Gilbertson

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Monroe Gallery of Photography presents two exhibitions in the gallery concurrent with on-line viewing

Monroe Gallery of Photography presents two exhibitions in the gallery concurrent with on-line viewing at www.monroegallery.com. The exhibits are on view July 3 through September 13, 2020; the Gallery is open to the public with Covid-19 safe operating procedures. Private viewing appointments are available by reservation. 

Ryan Vizzions: : A church flooded by Hurricane Florence stands silently in its reflection

 in Burgaw, North Carolina, 2018

LIFE ON EARTH

“Life on Earth” is a survey of 20th and 21st Century environmental and climate issues documented by photojournalists. Our world is changing faster – and in more ways – than we could have ever imagined. With social and economic disruption on a scale rarely seen since the end of World War II 75 years ago, the Covid-19 pandemic is also forcing us to completely rethink the notion of ‘business as usual’

The Earth’s climate is changing faster-and in more ways-than we previously imagined. This exhibit of climate related images hopes to promote awareness and motivate advocacy for the health of our planet. A narrated tour is available on our YouTube channel.

Tony Vaccaro: GThe Pink  Balcony, Puerto Rico, 1951

TONY VACCAO

GRIT AND RED WINE

“Grit and Red Wine” is special exhibition of photographs by Tony Vaccaro which includes several new discoveries from his archive being exhibited for the very first time. Tony Vaccaro, now 97, is one of the few people alive who can claim to have survived the Battle of Normandy and COVID-19.  Tony was drafted into WWII, in June of 1944 he was on a boat heading toward Omaha Beach, fighting the enemy while also photographing his experience at great risk. After the war, Tony remained in Germany to photograph the rebuilding of the country for Stars And Stripes magazine. Returning to the US in 1950, Tony started his career as a commercial photographer, eventually working for virtually every major publication: Look, Life, Harper’s Bazaar, Town and Country, Newsweek, and many more. Tony went on to become one the most sought after photographers of his day. Tony attributes his longevity to “blind luck, red wine” and determination.

“To me, the greatest thing that you can do is challenge the world. And most of these challenges I win. That’s what keeps me going.” –Tony Vaccaro, May, 2020

Photographer Tony Vaccaro in Santa Fe

57 years later, Tony Vaccaro returned to the location near Georgia O'Keeffe's home where he made his iconic photograph of Georgia holding " "Pelvic Series, Red with Yellow".

Photo courtesy of Tony Vaccaro Studio

"I took this photo 1960 of Georgia she told me not to take color photo and not to take her art of her studio. Well am sorry Georgia I did the opposite. " - Tony Vaccaro

VIEW THE TONY VACCARO: WAR AND PEACE ON-LINE EXHIBITION HERE

Exhibit reviews and articles

The Santa Fe New Mexican: Monroe Gallery to showcase trove of varied work by photojournalist Tony Vaccaro

The Albuquerque Journal: "The things we live with"

The Santa Fe New Mexican Pasatiempo: Tony Vaccaro's "War and Peace" at Monroe    

The Santa Fe Reporter: Not even a world war stopped this artist

Richard Stolley (left), former Time magazine bureau chief, senior editor and managing editor, and Assistant Managing Editor and Managing Editor of Life magazine, led a Q & A with photographer Tony Vaccaro (right) following the screening of the film "Underfire: The Untold Story of Pfc. Tony Vaccaro" at the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe.

Tony Vaccaro at Monroe Gallery

Photo by R. David Marks

Tony Vaccaro receiving the City of Santa Fe's Veteran's Service medal from

Santa Fe City Commissioner Signe Lindell, June 30, 201

(photo courtesy Tom Blog)

Tony Vaccaro: "War and Peace" remains on view through September 17, 2017

www.monroegallery.com

REVIEW: Margaret Bourke-White: Pioneering Photographer

Margaret Bourke-White, Fort Peck Dam, Fort Peck, MT, silver gelatin photograph, 14” x 11”, 1936

THE Magazine
June, 2015

IMAGINE, IF YOU CAN, A WORLD IN WHICH PHOTOGRAPHS WERE A RARE FORM

 of artistic documentation whose workings few understood. Imagine the United States in the first third of the twentieth century, with illiteracy and poverty key defining characteristics of the pitiable lives led by you and most everyone you knew. Images had nearly the power and drama, then, that they did during the Counter-Reformation in Europe, when the Catholic Church fought back against dull Protestantism with paintings as theatrical as opera sets, their shadowy depths filled with depictions of gruesome martyrdom—lit only at the moment of a would-be saint’s transmutation from agonizingly human into gloriously divine. Radiant sculptural forms of gold and silver reflected not merely the material wealth but the spiritual wealth of a religion that had dominated that part of the world for roughly a millennium. Bring yourself back now, from the seventeenth to the twentieth century and from Europe to the United States, populated by the shell-shocked heroes of the Great War dancing with pretty little flappers, their bobbed hairdos gleaming, and the gangsters, with their molls, who kept the country’s beak wet during Prohibition; imagine, finally, on a late fall day in 1929, stock-market millions vanishing within hours, heartlessly slamming shut the doors to the anything-goes twenties. (While you’re at it, imagine the unthinkable: Wall Street investors with such an overwhelming sense of responsibility that they jumped out of skyscrapers rather than face their own— and their clients’—financial ruin. Incomprehensible!) Meanwhile, the Great Depression loomed in the drought-stricken plains of America’s heartland. In the mind’s eye, these times could only have existed in grayed-out shades of black and white. Color, it seems, had been forgotten.

 

Unlike now, when anybody with a cell phone can, and unfortunately does, take pictures of everything from their breakfast to their genitalia—and makes them available to an unwitting public—only a very few of those initiated into the science of the lens and the alchemy of the darkroom were able to make photographs in the 1930s. Margaret Bourke-White was one of the few, and she led a charge of firsts: the first woman to photograph for LIFE magazine (for you post-Millennials, sort of the Internet of its time), the first accredited female war photographer (in World War II), and the first Western photographer allowed into the Soviet Union to record the proletariat’s triumph of mega-industry over the ease and comfort of privileged individuals.

 

In that heyday of pioneering photographers whom Bourke-White epitomized, black-and-white photography equaled photojournalism, which equaled truth with a capital T. This Truth was on a par with the same truth Americans revered in Norman Rockwell’s “real-life” scenes lifted straight out of a Mayberry without the laugh track, long before there was a Sheriff Taylor, Opie, Deputy Fife, or Aunt Bee. Or even television, for that matter. When images were few and far between, they had a credibility that is lost today in a thick overlay of irony and sheer disbelief. In the 1930s, if it appeared in LIFE magazine, or the Saturday Evening Post, or the newspaper, it was flat-out real.

Viewers lacked the objectivity to read meaning into a photograph as social commentary, for example, any more than the illiterate could read the black marks scratched into the white page.

The always-excellent Monroe Gallery presented their exhibition of silver gelatin photographs by Margaret Bourke-White as art, finding that, for her “as an artist,” photography served “as an instrument to examine social issues from a humanitarian perspective. She witnessed and documented some of the twentieth century’s most notable moments, including the liberation of German concentration camps by General Patton in 1945...” Bourke-White’s picture, “German civilians made to look at instruments of torture and execution at Buchenwald concentration camp, 1945,” is hardly an icon of objectivity. Nor should it be; some truths are beyond apprehension. Not to quibble with our dearly held ideals of photojournalism as an act of witnessing and documenting, but black-and-white imagery exists, among other reasons, when color cannot hold the entirety of its content. We demand this state of in-between-ness from art when what it depicts is too awful for mere reproduction.

While today you can find images of gore online anytime you choose to search for them, that they are not generally reproduced ad infinitum speaks to our understanding of the power of imagery. What Warhol repeated in a nightmarish grid (Jackie’s grief-stricken face on Air Force One en route from Dallas), and Picasso abstracted in his Guernica, Bourke-White reflected in the faces of her “German civilians” at Buchenwald.

Finally, when her country needed shoring up in 1936, during the height of the Depression, LIFE, a burgeoning publication that would become our society’s pocket mirror for at least a couple of decades, chose for its very first cover Bourke-White’s symbol of capitalism’s ultimate success. Her Fort Peck dam picture, all art-deco curves and fat-cat angles, describes more than the enormous potential for hydroelectric power: It is an image of America rediscovering her own righteous might, an America that, like the photographer “Maggie the Indestructible,” would liberate us from ourselves. There was the evidence, right in front of us in it-must­be-true black and white. —Kathryn M Davis

Margaret Bourke-White, Fort Peck Dam, Fort Peck, MT, silver gelatin photograph, 14” x 11”, 1936 ©Time Inc.

 

--The exhibition continues through June 28, 2015

 

 

"a moving tribute to an excellent photographer that also speaks to the power of the medium itself"

Tim Hetherington takes cover as a US Black Hawk helicopter lands on a rooftop during 'Operation Rock Avalanche' in the Korengal Valley, Afghanistan on October 20, 2007. Photo: Balazs Gardi

Via The Verge

HBO documentary on the life and death of conflict photographer Tim Hetherington premieres next month

Conflict photographers have the opportunity to create powerful and enduring images that can live on to define a time period — the downside is that they typically have to put themselves in harm's way to do so. Tim Hetherington, one of the more famous conflict photographers in recent memory, was killed while covering the front lines of Libyan city Misrata in April of 2011; now, his story will be told by his friend and filmmaker Sebastian Junger in Which Way is the Front Line From Here: The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington. Junger previous worked with Hetherington on Restrepo, a documentary about the Afghanistan war that premiered just before Hetherington's death.

 

The documentary, which was shown at this year's Sundance Film Festival, will make its HBO debut on April 18th. Judging from the quick trailer HBO has just released, we're expecting the documentary to be a moving tribute to an excellent photographer that also speaks to the power of the medium itself. For more about the film and Hetherington's career, check out this profile from Outside.

 

 

 

A Must-Have Book

Ashley Gilbertson/VII

During fierce fighting in the southern part of Fullujah, four wounded men surrendered to Marines from the Bravo company, 1st Battalion, 8th Regiment, 1st Marine Division. The men claimed they were students trying to escape the fight, Nov. 13, 2004

Last summer, we posted about the forthcoming publication of a groundbreaking new visual and oral history of America’s now ten-year conflict in the Middle East, "Photojournalists on War". The New York Times Lens blog today has featured  the book's introductory essay by Dexter Filkin, with a slide show selection of photographs from the book. Among the 39 photojournalists in the book are Andrea Bruce, Carolyn Cole, Stanley Greene, Tyler Hicks, Chris Hondros, Yuri Kozyrev, Khalid Mohammed and Joao Silva.

The exhibit “Invasion: Diaries and Memories of War in Iraq,” featuring work by Tim McLaughlin, Gary Knight and Peter Maass, opens March 14 at Mr. Kamber’s Bronx Documentary Center.



Related: Overexposed: A Photographer's War With PTSD

“That the First Amendment right to gather news is . . . not one that inures solely to the benefit of the news media; rather, the public’s right of access to information is coextensive with that of the press"

Via National Press Photographers Association June 8, 2012

"I read with disappointing disbelief your recent statement in the Queens Chronicle “that only one journalist was arrested during the operation, despite stories to the contrary,” which you called “a total myth.” I also found it incredulous that given our media coalition letter of November 21, 2011, which addressed the arrests of journalists in and around Zuccotti Park; and during our meeting with you and Commissioner Kelly on November 23, 2011, no one ever raised the issue that “Occupy Wall Street protesters were forging press credentials in an effort to get through the police lines.” To hear you now deny your department’s culpability by claiming that “actual reporters” were not arrested is an absolute revision of history and is more appropriate as part of “1984 Newspeak” than coming from the Deputy Commissioner for Public Information for the NYPD."


Via SaveTheNews.org

NYPD Tries to Rewrite History
"After becoming the epicenter for press suppression and journalist arrests over the last nine months, the NYPD is trying to rewrite history and pretend like nothing ever happened."

Via New York Observer Politicker  June 8, 2012
NYPD Spokesman Says Stories Of Reporters Arrested At Occupy Raid Were ‘A Total Myth’


Setting the Record Straight on NYPD Journalist Arrests


February 1, 2012: The New York Times fired off another letter to the Police Department today on behalf of 13 New York-based news organizations about police treatment of the press over the last several months.

"You got that credential you’re wearing from us, and we can take it away from you.”

November 18, 2011: As faculty members of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, we are alarmed at the arrests of working news professionals during the ongoing Occupy Wall Street protests, and deeply concerned that the NYPD blocked reporters' and photographers' access to Zuccotti Park during the recent eviction of the Occupy Wall Street encampment.

Police are roughing up journalists across U. S.

Alarmingly, we are seeing more and more posts about interference with the press, including photographers. UPDATED: "The Committee to Protect Journalists have released their report for 2011 which chronicles the attacks on journalists worldwide. They report that at least 43 journalists were killed including seven dead in Pakistan making it the deadliest country to work in as a journalist. Photojournalists suffered particularly heavy losses in 2011."


Via BuffaloNews.com



By Douglas Turner

News Staff Reporter

Updated: December 19, 2011, 6:30 AM

WASHINGTON — Half-dressed celebrities can’t get enough of them when posing along the rope lines of Hollywood or Dubai. Then there is the stale but true remark about how dicey it is to get between a certain legislator and the lens of a camera.

Beyond serving our amusements, the work of press photographers and reporters is deadly serious. The crux of the matter is that press photographers and reporters are our last guarantors of freedom.

Think Danny Pearl, beheaded by al-Qaida in 2002; Don Bolles, murdered by the mob in Arizona in 1978; and Lara Logan, brutally assaulted while monitoring the behavior of a dictator’s police during Egypt’s Arab Spring.

Worldwide, 889 journalists have been killed since 1992, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Today, photographers and reporters are being manhandled again in this country by police. Not in the smoky backwoods of the Deep South, as in the 1960s, but in cradles of so-called liberalism like New York, Los Angeles, Oakland and Rochester.

These cities are among dozens where the cops are moving out Occupy Wall Street protest encampments, and the police plainly don’t want citizens to see how they’re doing it. Photographers and reporters, with chains of credentials hanging off their necks like the Lord Mayor of London, are being handcuffed, herded into pens, hustled into police wagons and sometimes into court.

The cops under New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg are operating with impunity. Consider the timeline of a Buffalo lawyer, Mickey H. Osterreicher, who is in the middle of this swirl. Osterreicher, a former newspaper and television photographer, is general counsel of the National Press Photographers Association.

Osterreicher helped arrange a meeting with Bloomberg’s police commissioner, Ray Kelly, in Manhattan just before Thanksgiving to get Kelly to restrain his troops, who were roughing up demonstrators and journalists while closing down an Occupy encampment. Among the attendees were representatives of Thomson-Reuters, Dow-Jones and the New York Times.

On Nov. 21, Kelly sent out a pious-sounding directive to all police reminding them of the journalists’ constitutional rights and directing that they be treated with respect. “The next day,” Osterreicher said, “a photographer for the New York Daily News was interfered with. And there were absurd incidents involving journalists trying to cover the Thanksgiving Day parade.”

Last week, according to AtlanticWire. com, Kelly’s cops shoved a New York Times photographer down a set of stairs, then blocked him from shooting an Occupy protest. So much for Kelly’s paperwork.

In Los Angeles, police arrested a credentialed City News Service reporter trying to cover the dismantling of an Occupy site. A video shows police taking him to the ground as he tried to show his credentials. Police later claimed he was drunk.

Among Osterreicher’s cases is his defense of a student journalist in Rochester who was arrested trying to cover an Occupy protest there. In what Osterreicher claims is a “terrific waste of public resources,” the Monroe County prosecutor refuses to drop trespassing charges against the man.
Osterreicher sees some of the police-versus-press tension as cyclical. The Occupy movement and police anxiety following 9/11, he adds, prompt more of it. There is also some public myopia involved.

“Photographers were killed in Syria and Egypt,” he said. “What is seen as heroic overseas is looked on as offensive here.”

Police harassment of demonstrators and journalists doesn’t seem to trouble the Obama administration much. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-Manhattan, wrote to Attorney General Eric Holder on Dec. 6 asking for an investigation into police mauling of Occupy demonstrators. Holder hasn’t bothered to answer Nadler, ranking Democrat on a Judiciary subcommittee.


dturner@buffnews.com