War games: Photographer chronicles evolution of kids' play in Baghdad

Iraq "War Games", Baghdad, Iraq, July 2, 2007 - by Hadi Mizban

Copyright AP

History's Big Picture

"They did not have the spirit of childhood in them... They acted like men."

That's an observation by AP photographer Hadi Mizban as he narrates an interactive presentation of his photographs and video chronicling the evolution of children's play in one of Baghdad's most violent neighborhoods.

For years, Mizban has covered clashes there between militants and soldiers — and along the way, he has gathered powerful images of children living at the doorstep of war.

"They played with weapons because whenever they opened their front gate they found people with weapons," he says, speaking in Arabic.

In his chilling images, kids act out roles they have witnessed. Young boys with toy guns take a cowering hostage. Others threaten a girl and snatch her doll. They move through narrow alleys with miniature walkie-talkies and rocket launchers that look all too real.

But lately Mizban has noticed changes in the kids: "They've gone from aggressive children to peaceful children."

As his video shows, they play soccer on the dusty streets now. They wear jerseys of international teams like Real Madrid and pretend to be famous players — instead of insurgents, soldiers or criminals.

In these images, the Baghdad kids could be happy kids anywhere.

Mizban reflects on his reporting about the youngest in society: "You have to document the situation without blinking. But when you shoot pictures of children playing, children laughing, there is hope."

'This is one of the most powerful photographic shows I have ever seen and, certainly, in my opinion, the best Santa Fe has ever had the privilege of hosting.'

Alfred Eisenstaedt: VJ-Day, Times Square, August 14, 1945

Via SantaFe.com
By Tom McQuire

16 July, 2011
Culture vulture

History’s Big Picture

I have always been amazed with, not only the scope of the collection housed at Monroe Gallery of Photography – both in gallery shows and those items that rotate in and out of storage, but also the myriad ways in which owners Sidney and Michelle Monroe have placed these images in relevant shows throughout the ten years that the gallery has graced Don Gaspar, just off the Plaza. Their latest show, History's Big Picture, is by far the most compelling show they have ever mounted. Its appearance in this tenth year after Sid and Michelle moved their gallery to Santa Fe from Manhattan following the  Sept 11^th attacks, takes us on a journey through the history of our country and the world, before and after the events of that fateful September day. Having seen the show on July 4^th, I will be forever changed by the images on those walls.

With History's Big Picture Sid and Michelle mine the depth and breadth of Monroe Gallery's archives; combined with new, never-before exhibited photojournalism masterpieces, from the early 1920's to the present day.

From Ed Clark’s poignant image of a Navy CPO Graham Jackson playing in tribute to FDR’s coffin passing on a train, through the somber reality of Carl Mydans photograph of commuters on the 6:25 25 from Grand Central to Stamford, CT, November 22, 1963 reading of John Kennedy’s assassination and the euphoria of the events of Woodstock, 1969 by Amalie R. Rothschild; we arrive at Eric Smith’s haunting and thought-provoking image of an empty auditorium just prior to the funeral for a soldier who died in Iraq in 2006. In this show we see the great arc of our country’s history. This is one of the most powerful photographic shows I have ever seen and, certainly, in my opinion, the best Santa Fe has ever had the privilege of hosting. Bravo Sid and Michelle!

The show remains up at Monroe through September 25^th.

"The Soiling of Old Glory”: The Power of a Photograph




“The Soiling of Old Glory”: The Power of a Photograph Lecture by Louis Masur

Thursday, July 14 7-9pm
Fairfield Museum and History Center, Fairfield, CT
$8; Members and Students, $3
To register in advance, call 203-259-1598.

Join us for Trinity College Professor Louis Masur’s engaging discussion of The Soiling of Old Glory, a 1976 Pulitzer Prize winning photograph by Stanley Forman. Learn how an harrowing image of an angry white teenager brandishing an American flag at an African-American man crystallized complex issues about forced busing.

Taken in April of 1976, the photograph is of Theodore Landsmark, an African American lawyer heading to Boston's city hall for a case. Here he encountered over one hundred and fifty anti-busing youths from South Boston and Charleston protesting the decision to bus in students from Roxbury, an African American suburb. Entering into this, Landsmark was attacked, ironically, with an American flag, in Boston, home of the Revolution, on the 200th anniversary of the United States. The photo won freelance photographer Stanley J. Forman of the Boston Herald American a Pulitzer Prize.


On April 5, 1976, Stanley Forman, age 30, reported to work early, as he always did. A photographer for the Boston Herald American, Forman had a nose for the news. A year before he had raced to a fire in Boston and captured a horrifying moment as a fire escape gave way and a woman and girl plunged to the ground. The photograph was reprinted around the world and led to changes in fire safety codes.

Sitting at the city desk that April morning, Forman asked what was going on and his editor dispatched him to City Hall Plaza where an anti-busing protest was under way. As Forman arrived at the scene, he saw the group coming towards him. He also saw a black man walking across the plaza and sensed there might be trouble. Forman was too close to get a picture with the lenses on his two cameras, so he quickly changed to a 20mm lens. He started shooting, but heard the motor drive failing and he began taking single frames manually. The entire incident lasted ten or fifteen seconds; Forman took some twenty-odd shots, though a few of the negatives ran together. As he returned to the office, he had no idea what he had.

It did not take long to discover that the image of a protester wielding the American flag as a weapon to attack the man identified as Theodore Landsmark, an attorney, was a powerful one. Some editors feared that publishing it might inflame the already volatile racial situation in Boston. But it had happened, it was news, and, in the year of the bicentennial, it captured something profound about patriotism, race, and violence in America. The Boston Herald American ran it on the front page on April 6. The photograph appeared as well in the New York Times, Washington Post, and many other papers around the country.

A week or so after taking the photograph, Forman learned that he had won the Pulitzer Prize for his fire escape picture the year before. As he prepared to submit the flag photograph for Pulitzer consideration a colleague suggested the title “The Soiling of Old Glory.” It is an ideal title for a stunning spot news photograph. In April 1977, Forman learned that he had again won the Pulitzer Prize for his work on that April day. Two years later, he was part of the staff that won the Prize for coverage of the blizzard of 1978. The most accomplished spot news photographer of his era, Forman is now an equally accomplished, award-winning television news photographer.

Louis P. Masur
Trinity College

A PHOTO EDITOR: GALLERIST INTERVIEW

Photograph by Irving Haberman

Via APhotoEditor

A Photo Editor (APE) is Rob Haggart, the former Director of Photography for Men's Journal and Outside Magazine. We count on the site as a daily must-read.

Interview With Gallerist Sidney Monroe
July 15, 2011
Contributor Jonathan Blaustein interviews Sidney Monroe owner of the Monroe Gallery in Santa Fe, NM.

JB: How did you get involved in the business?

SM: It was accidental, almost. After college, I worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Then, I started working in contemporary galleries in New York.

JB: Were you in the photo department at the Met?

SM: I was not. I was in the retail department. It was a fascinating time, because it was at the time of the Tutankhamun exhibition, and it was the first time they put a satellite retail operation in the exhibition, as opposed to just in the gift shop. It spurred their entire retail model. I can’t remember the numbers, but in the three years I was there, sales went from like $3 million to $50 million, because of the expansion of the retail model. This was before they had the retail stores in airports and such.

JB: So is this in the 80′s?

SM: This is in the early 80′s, yeah. I had been a business and economics major in college, and always had an interest in the arts. My circle of friends was always artistically inclined. I was completely talentless…

JB: Entirely, perfectly talentless?

SM: Entirely talentless, but I was always in a circle of creative people. When I took that job at the Met, it was a beginning opportunity in the retail department as they were expanding. Within a year, I became a manger of the book shop. In the book store, you could take anything you wanted to read, you could purchase at at discount, and I immersed myself in learning about art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is an incredible place.

JB: It’s my favorite museum in the world. I studied art more there, when I lived in New York, than even in graduate school.

SM: Anyone who’s been there knows you can spend hours, days wandering, and still not see it all. And I had access to the catacombs, because there’s storage under Central Park. You go down in there, and there’s a Rodin sculpture with a tarp over it. Crates with you can’t imagine what might be in there.

JB: I would kill for a chance to see that. If any of your people end up reading this, I want a secret tour.

SM: I’m sure it’s all changed. Especially in a Post-9/11 world. This was the 80′s, things were very loose, and it was a great training ground.

JB: So you moved from there to the photo gallery world?

SM: The contemporary gallery world.

JB: Where?

                                                     Photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt

SM: I started at a gallery that’s no longer in existence, and quite frankly I can’t remember the name. Then I went to The Circle Gallery, which was a commercial galley specializing in contemporary prints. For a while, they were kind of legendary for having a retail model for a gallery, opening different branches in other cities. That’s where I cut my teeth in the art business. That led to an opportunity to meet Alfred Eisenstadt. He was in his 80′s, and had done some museum exhibits. But he had never done a gallery/selling exhibit. Somehow he had gotten in contact with the owner of The Circle Gallery. I was then the director, and became involved in talking with Eisenstadt about doing an exhibit. My wife-to-be and I got to go up to the Time-Life Building, and sit across from Eisie at his desk. We were both in our 20′s, he was in his 80′s, and it was like a lightbulb went off. I was sitting across from a man who has witnessed history.That’s when I got hooked. We did this exhibit, it traveled nationally, and was huge at the time. It was on CNN, Good Morning America, all the morning talk shows.

JB: Had any of the LIFE photographers shown their work in a gallery context before that?

SM: Not so much. Time-Life had a small gallery in the building, and they would routinely do exhibits for the photographers, but nowhere near the scale of a public gallery. Eisie was a very, very smart man. Of all the LIFE photographers, he published dozens of books. He was ahead of his time in that he understood that photojournalism should be more broadly available to the public, as opposed to just existing in a magazine. I firmly believe this drove the last 10 years of his life. He worked on supervising his prints, traveling exhibitions, doing interviews, meeting the public, from the time he was 85 until he died at 96.

That set off a spark for me, and within a couple of years after that, I had two partners and we opened a gallery in Soho on Grand St. It was just devoted to photography, with an emphasis on photojournalism. That gallery opened in the fall of 1996. We did several shows with LIFE magazine photographers, and presented the first ever exhibition from the archives of Margaret Bourke-White’s estate. Fast-forwarding, after 9/11, being in that location was no longer viable for commerce. My wife and I decided to leave Manhattan, come to Santa Fe, and start over.

JB: Why did you choose Santa Fe?

SM: It’s a good question, and we’re just realizing that we’ve been here 10 years, now, and it’s gone by very quickly. We couldn’t find a location in Manhattan quick enough to relocate. The location we had on Grand St was the quintessential Soho gallery. Cast-iron columns, 16 ft ceilings, everything you would want in a beautiful gallery. Already the migration had already started towards Chelsea. We looked, and all that would be available, if you weren’t one of the big players, would be on the 6th, 7th, 8th floor of a building in Chelsea, and I didn’t like that model. We have always believed in photojournalism, and that it needs to be seen by the public. We’re very passionate about spreading the message, so the public is integral to what we do.

We’d visited New Mexico, and I have family roots here. We knew there was a vibrant art scene in Santa Fe. We did some research, and depending on the data, it was either number two or three art market behind Manhattan. Quite frankly, we took a leap of faith. 9/11 happened. We decided in October, we moved over Christmas break, and we opened the gallery in Santa Fe in April of 2002. We honed down very tightly on photojournalism. That’s all we’ve focused on showing here.

JB: Are there other galleries now that have followed your lead and do what you do, or do you still feel like you’ve got a unique position in the market?

Photograph by Bill Eppridge

SM: I think we accidentally found a unique niche. Accidentally, because it followed from a passion. Something sparked, and that’s the direction I went in, and at the time nobody else was really doing it. Now there have always been some photo galleries that show some photojournalism in with their other programming, but to my knowledge, there is still nobody doing pure photojournalism, and that’s really become what we’re known for. Both within the collecting and museum community, and the public gallery-going community as well.

JB: I’m sitting here in the gallery, surrounded by artifacts of American history, and I know you said already that you developed a relationship with Alfred Eisenstadt, and that was the catalyst for the gallery, but how did you develop relationships with the other photographers whose work you show? Especially because I’ve got to imagine you’re working with Estates, because many of these people have passed on.

SM: That’s correct.

–(editor’s note: Right here, we were interrupted by a strange woman who took the time to complain that there were no photographs of dancers on the wall. She felt slighted. Mr. Monroe patiently answered her questions, and treated her with respect, despite the fact that she was behaving like a complete nutbar.)

SM: Partly, it was fortunate timing. When we began, many of these photographers were still alive. Eisenstadt introduced us to many of his colleagues at LIFE magazine, Carl Mydans was still living, as were many of the other LIFE photographers. It’s almost like a fraternity. One of the things we’ve been so passionate about is getting these photographers to make prints while they’re still alive. As a photojournalist, unlike a lot of other photographers, they never considered making prints during their lifetime. They were on assignment. They had a job to to. They got their assignment from LIFE or LOOK or whomever, they went out in the field, shot their work, sent their film back, and chances are they never even saw it. It was edited, and used or not used in a magazine.

When we met some of these other photographers, particularly with Carl Mydans, and we suggested that they could go back through the work and see it fresh. He’s seen it in a magazine, or a book, but to sit down with a negative and a printer…the printer would say, “Carl, you can make it this big or that big, we use different paper, crop it this way or that.” It opened up a whole new possibility for them in doing their work. We’ve met these photographers, we’ve encouraged them to do this, but a lot of times they’re hesitant. It’s just not something that’s in their thought process.

JB: Then. But probably we would say that’s changed.

Photograph by Eddie Adams

SM: That has changed. And now you get a lot more photographers who say, “I want to do what he did.” It really was like a fraternity, and one by one, we either knew about photographers, sometimes we’d talk to them and they’d be resistant. I knew Eddie Adams way back when in New York. Eddie was infamous for refusing galleries. I never really approached him, but I’d always talk to him about it. Within a few months of his passing, his wife came to us and asked us to represent the Estate. It’s a combination of people coming to us, people we’ve put out feelers to, and it’s a very close-knit community. Almost all of our photographers are colleagues of some sort. Sometimes to almost a humorous point. We did an exhibit once, and a photographer found out he was hanging next to another photographer, and he said, “Son-of-a-bitch, I hated him then, and I don’t want to hang next to him in your gallery.” So we moved the exhibit around a little bit.

JB: You did?

SM: We did. My wife likes to say “We work for them.” And that’s true. A lot of times they’re elderly, and we feel very privileged. It’s important to get their work represented, particularly while they’re alive, and to get prints made that will represent a legacy for the future.

JB: You developed a relationship with a network of photographers who knew one another, and as your reputation built, they came to want to work with you. But what about the collectors themselves? How did you develop a relationship with a network of people who wanted to buy these prints.

SM: It started very innocently. This is what we were passionate about. This is what we put on the walls. This is what we want to talk about. And it was slow going in the beginning. We had many times where we had exhibits up, and the established photo collector would be like, “Gee, I don’t know about your gallery,” and then they’d look at it, and they’d say, “But this is photojournalism?” And we were like, “Yeah, isn’t it great?” A lot of what we’ve done, is that we’ve educated people about photojournalism.
Moving to Santa Fe was very liberating, in a way, because in the New York art world, there’s a tremendous pressure. What’s hot? What’s the next big thing? More so in the art world, but it does also permeate into the photo world. So seeing old history on the wall isn’t very sexy. Moving to Santa Fe, there’s more freedom, it seems, of peoples’ perceptions of art in general. We’ve tried to create an environment where the photographs speak for themselves.

JB: So most of your collectors have been into the space? Are most of the people local to Santa Fe?

Photograph by Steve Schapiro

SM: No. We have a very wide base. Fortunately, having been in business in Manhattan for so many years, a lot of those clients follow us. Of course, so much can be done in the virtual world now. It doesn’t replace the experience, but certainly they can follow the imagery. We also do photo fairs in New York and Los Angeles. Often, it comes from the first conversation you have with a person about why they’re having a visceral reaction to a particular image. Being complete academic nerds, we can recite everything that was ever vaguely relevant about a particular photographer. It’s about cultivating relationships and knowledge. You touched on the retail model. I believe it’s an important model for a photography gallery. And by retail, I don’t mean retail selling.

JB: Well, that was my next question. Because we’re in downtown Santa Fe, and during the course of this interview, I’d say 25 people have already been into the gallery, and an additional 40 have been looking at pictures through the window. I think some people believe that people come in and buy things off the wall, and other people think that’s a fantasy. I was hoping we might be able to address, from your own standpoint, how it actually works.

SM: Personally, our goal is to spread the gospel of photojournalism, so getting the work seen by the public is critical. It’s a part of what we do, and another part is to educate. That doesn’t mean we preach, but I’m available to anyone who wants to ask questions, as we saw earlier, from mundane to serious. There’s no screening process of who gets to talk to me.

JB: Is that because we’re in Santa Fe? I wrote some things that were critical of some of the galleries in Chelsea for that reason. The approachability factor is nil. Here you’re talking about the fact that you’re almost perfectly approachable.

SM: That was our posture in New York. It’s just who I am and the way I work. It is bothersome sometimes, but that’s just the way it is. And I have to say that it has resulted in some incredibly long-term relationships with very important collectors. I think it’s a thing in the art world, and everybody has their model, and they can do it the way they want. But by design, I want the work to be seen, I want people to be able to ask questions. The retail model for us is that we’re open to the public, and we’re here to show photography. Both in New York and Santa Fe, we’re connected to schools, workshops, communities. Santa Fe is wonderful because of the Santa Fe Workshops, and Center as well. Many instructors bring their classes in here.

JB: You’re talking about retail as a way to engage with the public and have an exhibition space that enables the work to be seen. I’m curious, a bit, about the alternative way of viewing the concept of retail. The idea that people are going to walk in off the street, buy something off the wall, and take it home with them. As opposed to sales coming through built-up relationships over time. How often do you find that members of the public cross over to become collectors, as opposed to the public being appreciators?

SM: It’s hard to quantify, but obviously it’s a very small percentage. But just yesterday, a young couple came in and asked about a Margaret Bourke-White photograph we had exhibited seven years ago. They got married here seven years ago, and came back again on vacation. They asked about the photograph and they bought it.

JB: So it happens, but it’s the exception. It’s not the basis of your business.

SM: No. It’s not the basis of our business.

JB: Nor could it be?

SM: No. Nor could it be. Or should it be.

JB: Right, but in a sense, we’re talking about the exhibition divested from commerce. The exhibition is about getting the work seen, which is not that different from a museum or a public space.

SM: That’s exactly right. A lot of people, as they exit the gallery, say this is like a museum.

JB: As you said before, by design. You could be a private dealer with a small office, if you wanted to be.

Photograph by John Filo

SM: Absolutely. And we curate based upon our agenda, which is to tell a story. A lot of times, you get comments from the public, “How do you know which one’s going to sell?” Well, that never even enters into the equation. And on the flip side, there are a lot of times where we have controversial pictures that upset people, and they say, “Why do you put that on the wall?” Because it’s part of the story. It’s very important.

JB: It’s a perfect opportunity to ask, you’re opening your big summer exhibition called “History’s Big Picture” on July 1st. It’s not on the wall today, so I thought you might be able to tell us a bit about that.

SM: Curating is always interesting, because you’re juggling dozens of ideas. It occurred to us that this year is our 10th year anniversary in Santa Fe, during which time we built our photojournalism focus. And it occurred to us that we’ve got this incredible stable of photojournalism that we could curate from and make “History’s Big Picture.” The hardest part is editing, because we could do ten exhibits called “History’s Big Picture” and not duplicate any images.

JB: Really? How big an archive do you have? Given what you just said, how many pictures do you have access to?

SM: Jonathan, I couldn’t even tell you…

JB: Thousands?

SM: Thousands. We have archives in the gallery, we have off-site location here and in Manhattan, and we have our photographers who maintain archives.

JB: Sure. I interrupted, but you were talking about “History’s Big Picture.” As a curator, that’s kind of a broad theme. What did that mean to you?

SM: The pictures that tell the story of history. You have to edit your timeline for history, of course.

JB: American history?

SM: Primarily history as it relates to America. We chose 1930 as the starting point, and wanted to come as close to the present as possible. We have several images from 2006, 2007 and 2008.

JB: Am I correct that for the recent work, you’re showing Nina Berman’s pictures?

SM: We are.

JB: At APE, we spoke to her earlier this year. She’s fantastic. How did you come to get her work in the show?

SM: She is fantastic. She’s somebody I’ve admired. For photojournalists today, they’re obviously working in a challenging environment, and a changed one as far as the media goes. In the heyday, you had vehicles like LIFE or LOOK, where that work was published, the photographer became known, and the public saw the work. In today’s media world, getting images shown is very challenging.

JB: You mean getting images seen?

SM: Yes, getting images seen.

JB: It’s a distinction we could probably talk about for an hour, but I think most people reading this will probably know the difference.

SM: Of course. The visual clutter that’s prevalent today. And the change of the economy of scale of the media. So Nina is one of the many contemporary photojournalists that I’ve known about, followed and admired. I wasn’t sure how we could show her work and do it justice, but in the context of this exhibit, I felt that we’ve got to have it. She was so gracious and accommodating, and it was an honor to have five of her photographs in the exhibit. We’ve got two from “Homeland Security” and three from the “Marine Wedding” series.

JB: Including the Ty Zeigler wedding portrait?

SM: Including the wedding portrait.

JB: Which I saw on the wall in New York last year, which led to the interview with Nina. So we’ve come full circle. That picture will now be on the wall here in Santa Fe all summer long.

SM: And I’m prepared. That picture’s going to elicit a lot of, I don’t know if controversy is the right word. But in the context of a public exhibition, in summer, which is high traffic tourist season in Santa Fe, the good side is obviously this show will get a lot of exposure. And the other side is that there are some very difficult photographs in this exhibit. But that’s history. That’s reality.

JB: Sure. Well, I know that everyone hates to be asked what’s your favorite, or what’s the best, or this or that. But I thought maybe if I put you on the spot, you might be able to pull out some old-school war story from back in the day that somebody told you that you still tell at dinner parties when you’ve had four glasses of wine.

SM: There’s a few.

JB: I’m sure there are many. But can you give us one?

Photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt

SM: One of my all time favorites happens to be about Eisenstadt. This was at an opening for one of Eisie’s shows. He was a small man, and he was very confident of his success, shall we say. So this was at a big opening, and lots of big collectors were invited. I had a collector who’d bought several of Eisie’s pictures, and he said he’d like to meet Eisie. I said absolutely, and he asked if his son could come too. I said “Sure,” and made the introduction. Eisie was always very gracious, but he didn’t like to hang out with people too much. So the man said, “Mr. Eisenstadt, I just bought my son a camera, and I told him, now you can take pictures like Eisenstadt.” And Eisenstadt just stopped and gave him this stare, and he said, “My dear sir, I have ten fingers, and I cannot play the piano like Horowitz.” At that point, I said thank you very much and escorted him away.

JB: It’s kind of dry.

SM: It’s very dry. There’s the face value that says anybody can take pictures. And it’s a very good point, especially nowadays, where everybody’s a photographer. It’s the topic du jour now. I’ve seen so many articles about it.

JB: Me too, so we don’t even have to go there. But if you don’t mind, I’d like to ask one more question. What advice would you give to someone who wanted to get into this part of the business? What do you think is the pathway into the gallery industry in 2011?

SM: First and foremost, it has to be your passion. Unfortunately in the world we’re in today, a lot of people glamorize the business. They think it would be so glamorous to have a fancy gallery, and it has to be your passion.

JB: So not everyone gets to blow lines with Naomi Campbell?

SM: No. But we had a great exhibit back in New York with a good friend of mine named Mick Rock, who’s really become quite successful now. He was known as the man who shot the 70′s. He did all the rock and roll photography. He was Bowie’s photographer and Lou Reed’s photographer. I got to know him, and I convinced him to do an exhibit. So when we did the show, we had Bowie, and Iman and Lou Reed hanging out. I would always say, “I’m never going to get rid of that desk chair,” because Bowie and Lou Reed sat in that chair.

But that’s not why you get into the business, is my point. If you’re passionate about the work, it will be rewarding no matter what, because you’re doing what you enjoy. And that’s the bottom line. It’s a job, and it’s work. It’s a fabulous job, and it’s fabulous work, but it’s a job.

If you’ve got the passion, the first step is to find your photographers. There’s a partnership between a gallery and the photographer/artist. You’re in it together. It’s not one or the other, it’s both. When I sell a print and call up the photographer to tell them, that’s a celebration we share. The next thing that follows is the relationships with your clients. And then you take it from there.

by A Photo Editor on July 15, 2011

"Middle America Fights Our Wars"

Eric Smith: Leenawee County Fair, Michigan, 2007



From History's Big Picture


Eric Smith has gone in search of Middle America, which he defines as the people living in the nation’s small towns and the less-than-glamorous cities far from the coasts. “Middle America drives our economy, defines popular culture, and fights our wars.” 

Smith isn’t an economist, and he admits that perhaps he’s wrong about the cultural impact of the spending power of small towns. But an Associated Press study has confirmed his belief about their importance to the Iraq war: half of U.S. troops killed in Iraq came from communities with fewer than 25,000 people. And one in five soldiers hails from a town with fewer than 5,000 residents, according to AP.



Smith took a picture at afuneral in a high- school gymnasium in Morley, Mich. “The town’s so small that two towns had to come together to build a high school, but it was standing room only with 500 bikers lined up outside,” he said. “A lot of these kids were football players and popular. They are 18, 19, 20, or 21 — fresh out of high school — so the whole school shows up.”

Eric Smith: Funeral for Iraq War Soldier, Morley, Michigan,2006

Ernst Haas: Master of Colour

Via BBC News In Pictures

Phil Coomes

Picture editor
July 12, 2011

For many of us who came to photography in the 1970s or 80s it was black and white that drew us in, and in terms of press or documentary photography it called the shots.


There was of course plenty of colour work out there, particularly in the US, but it was an Austrian, Ernst Haas, who first grabbed my attention and showed me the power of colour photography.

Working with a 35mm camera and primarily on Kodachrome film he had an eye like no other. His pictures showed intense pools of colour and light. Were these really scenes from our world or creations of his mind? The answer was both.

Brooklyn, New York, USA, 1952 by Ernst Haas

Of course Haas was a big name and had been photographing in colour since the 1950s. His landmark exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1962 was the first to challenge the rule of black and white photographs in the art world. Haas was riding high and continued to do so throughout his career.

Haas was one of the early members of Magnum Photos and photographed for Life Magazine among others. He also shot film stills and his book The Creation went on to sell more than 350,000 copies. He also produced a number of audio visual slideshows feeling you could say more with multiple images than a single frame, I reckon he'd do well today.

And yet in the forward to a new book, Color Correction, William A Ewing states that Haas' pictures were often seen as being too commercial and by the 1970s parts of the art world no longer championed him.

Ewing goes on to say: "His (Haas) work was also judged too simplistic, lacking in the complexities and ironies that marked the imagery of Haas' younger rivals, who were also busy forging a new language of colour. As a result, Haas's reputation has suffered in comparison with the leading lights of what came to be known as 'the New Colour', notably William Eggleston, Joel Sternfeld, Stephen Shore, and Joel Meyerowitz."

Yet alongside his commercial work Haas shot for pleasure, and it is a small number of these pictures that are reproduced in the book.

New Orleans, USA, 1960 by Ernst Haas

Ewing searched through around 200,000 of Haas' pictures held in the Getty Archive in London, spurred on by a nagging doubt that perhaps he had dismissed his work too readily. Ewing says that these pictures:

"Are far more edgy, loose, enigmatic, and ambiguous than his celebrated work. Most of these pictures he never even printed, let alone published, probably assuming that they were too difficult to be understood. These images are of great sophistication, and rival (and sometimes surpass) the best work of his colleagues."

Haas' desire to shape the world as he sees it through his colour work sits well today. For we accept the way a photographer's own views alter and manipulate the picture he or she takes, and no longer hold to the notice of objective reality. It's time to dust off his archives and let them be seen by another generation, for now you can enjoy the frames here.

California, USA, 1976 by Ernst Haas

I'll leave the last word to Haas:

"Bored with obvious reality, I find my fascination in transforming it into a subjective point of view. Without touching my subject I want to come to the moment when, through pure concentration of seeing, the composed picture becomes more made than taken. Without a descriptive caption to justify its existence, it will speak for itself - less descriptive, more creative; less informative, more suggestive - less prose, more poetry." Ernst Haas from About Color Photography, in DU, 1961, via Color Correction.

New Mexico, USA, 1975 by Ernst Haas

Color Correction by Ernst Haas published by Steidl

COMPOSING THE ARTIST EXHIBITION REVIEW IN ARTNEWS

Steve Schapiro: Rene Magritte, MOMA, New York, 1965

Composing The Artist
Monroe Gallery of Photography

via ARTnews
Summer, 2011 Issue
This exhibition of black-and-white photographic portraits felt like a series of encounters with some of the great writers and artists of the 20th century. Steve Schapiro’s images of René Magritte are striking for the way they seamlessly and surrealistically frame the painter in front of—and thereby illusionistically within—his own paintings. One almost expects to see words in careful cursive spelling out “This is not a Magritte” across the surface of the print, so convincingly do these images embody the self-reflective paradoxes for which the Belgian Surrealist is known.

Carl Mydans’s shot of Vladimir Nabokov leaning out a car window, looking at us with eyes that are somehow both piercing and laconic and a slight grin on his face, inspired a new level of appreciation for the writer’s prodigious wit and perverse intelligence. Iconic portraits of David Hockney, Picasso, and Warhol were also on view here, but coming face-to-face with William Faulkner was a rarer treat.

The gallery’s pairing of a Martha Holmes picture of Jackson Pollock pouring paint and an Ernst Haas image of Helen Frankenthaler caught in the same activity exposes the contrasting temperaments of the artists. Pollock crouches, cigarette dangling, flinging strands of pigment from a besmirched bucket with an expression of intensity, while Frankenthaler carefully bends at the waist to spill a quantity of paint from a parkling stainless-steel pail. She is deliberate, even delicate in her approach.

-- Jon Carver
Summer 2011

War Photography: Bomb Took 3 Limbs, but Not Photographer’s Can-Do Spirit

Andrew Testa for The New York Times

"I have never seen myself as seriously wounded," says Giles Duley.

 
By C. J. CHIVERS
Published: July 8, 2011
LONDON


TO the annals of understatement and optimism add this: the account of Giles Duley, an independent photographer, about the moment after he stepped on a hidden bomb while covering an American and Afghan infantry patrol.

Mr. Duley heard a click and felt a flash of heat as the explosion lifted him into the air. He landed on his side on the dirt, roughly five yards from where he had stood. He smelled the stink of the explosives mixed with that of his own burned flesh. He took stock.

“I remember looking up and seeing bits of me and my clothes in the tree, which I knew wasn’t a good sign,” he said. “I saw my left arm. It was just obviously shredded to pieces, and smoldering. I couldn’t feel my legs, so straightaway and from what I could see in the tree, I figured they were gone.”

Mr. Duley had become, in that flash, a triple amputee. Now he risked swiftly bleeding to death. He recalled uttering a single word: “bollocks.”

As the American soldiers he had been walking with rushed toward him and began tightening the tourniquets that would save his life, a fuller line of thought took flight. Rather than tally what was missing, Mr. Duley counted what remained.

“I thought, ‘Right hand? Eyes?’ ” — he realized that all of these were intact — “and I thought, ‘I can work.’ ”

Mr. Duley, 39, was wounded in February in Kandahar Province, becoming another in the long line of casualties in the Pentagon’s offensive to displace the Taliban from one of its rural strongholds.

Five months on, after leaving the hospital, he is roughly midway through a 12-week physiotherapy regimen at Headley Court, a military rehabilitation center near London.

There, freshly fitted with two prosthetic legs and a left arm, he has been relearning to walk and confronting the details of pushing forward in life. Pulled along by what would seem an incurably upbeat mind, he is making plans to return to work as a photographer.

WHEN he set out for Afghanistan, Mr. Duley, a former fashion and celebrity photographer who changed his focus to cover what he considered untold stories of human suffering and resilience, had been preparing to start a quarterly photography journal, to be called Document.

In an interview at his sister’s home in London during a weekend furlough, he said the project had not been derailed by his wounds. He said he hoped to publish the inaugural issue next year. But before doing so, he said, he wants to return to the field.

His first planned trip? Back to Kandahar, to photograph the medical treatment of Afghan civilians.

The technicians who fashion the prosthetic limbs at Headley Court are crafting a stubby prosthetic arm that will be fitted with a tripod head. To this, Mr. Duley said, he will attach a camera that he will raise to his eye, and then get back to work.

“You see?” he said, demonstrating how he can move the remaining portion of his left arm. He swung the stump quickly to his face. Then, with his right hand, he depressed an imaginary shutter button on an imaginary camera hovering where his arm came to its abruptly severed end. “The length is just about perfect,” he said.

Mr. Duley’s misfortune has made his own life resemble those of the profile subjects he once sought. But he has framed his lot not as a tragedy — “I have never seen myself as seriously wounded,” he said — but as a life-altering hardship that contains opportunity, too.

As a triple amputee, he said, he hopes to channel interest in his own struggles into bringing more attention to the suffering of other people. “For me to make sense of what happened to me, I have to make it advantageous to the work I do,” he said.

If this cheerful blend of pragmatism and editorial sense could seem to suggest that his journey has been easy, do not be deceived. Mr. Duley has traveled a terrifying path.

Soon after he was wounded, complications set in. Laboring on a respirator, he nearly died from a lung condition and soaring body temperatures in his first weeks in England. On Feb. 26 his family was called at night to his bedside, told that he might not last until dawn.


He survived. Even in the vigil, he said, he never accepted the possibility of death. “I would think, ‘breathe, breathe, breathe,’ ” he said.

If ever there was a thought that distilled a will to live, it was this.

By mid-March he was awake again. A new test began — trying to learn how to sit up and how to move, much less walk. With only one limb, and weakened by illness and from weeks of being almost motionless, he could not even drag himself along the floor.

ONCE the picture of self-sufficiency, he discovered that until he restored his physical fitness and learned to use prosthetic limbs, he would remain, in a word, a dependent. These indelible facts were made miserably clear in late April when, while trying to wash, he toppled from a shower stool.

There on the tiles, bleeding from a stump and unable to right himself or move anywhere, he was carried away by three nurses. He was naked. And crying. “That was the absolute bottom,” he said.

Since then he has been in almost continuous sessions of exercise and therapy, pushing himself upright and making himself start to walk, while accepting, he said, “that no matter how good I get, I will always keep falling.”

Other problems remain. He expects to undergo three more operations this year — a colostomy reversal, the removal of a bone spur at the end of his shattered right femur, the excision of balled nervous tissue in his left arm. He anticipates further surgeries in the years beyond.

All the while, he suffers from a particular affliction of the amputee: phantom pains, the excruciating alarm calls from limbs that no longer exist.

“Right now what I feel is a crushing sensation there,” he said, looking toward where his right foot would be. He added: “And there is on fire,” glancing to where he once had a left hand.

He said he had been told that these pains may never go away.

His balm is not painkillers, which he said he ceased taking a few weeks ago. It will be, he said, to restore his mobility and carry on.

For now, that means rounds of exercise alongside soldiers whose limbs were lost in the same ways. Gaining access to their regimen at the rehab center was difficult. Some in the government bureaucracy tried to block Mr. Duley’s admission.

Many objections were raised, including that as a civilian nearing 40, Mr. Duley was not in the same physical condition and mind-set as the young military men he would be working beside.

Three limbs gone, spirit whole, the photographer smiled as he recalled the exchange. “Don’t worry,” he said he jokingly assured the medical official who advanced that argument. “The soldiers will learn to keep up.”

The Giles Duley Fund
 
Related:  The war photographer’s biggest story: themselves
 
 Purple Hearts by Nina Berman opens at Royal Society of Medicine, London. Until 31st July



      

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.

Purple Hearts by Nina Berman opens at Royal Society of Medicine, London. Until 31st July

Via Trolley News

Royal Society of Medicine
Auchi Foyer,
1 Wimpole Street
London W1G 0AE

Since its publication in 2004, Purple Hearts has been widely featured in the international press, and has toured museum, galleries, art shows, as well as civic spaces in the United States and Europe. Most recently Berman’s portraits of US soldiers returned from the Iraq war since 2003, were shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Milan Triennale, Melkweg Gallery, Amsterdam, and at the Scottish Parliament, Edinburgh. Nina Berman is also the author of Homeland (Trolley Books, 2008)

Nina Berman talks about the photographs she took of wounded Americans on Youtube

Selections Nina Berman's "Marine Wedding" and "Homeland Security" arfe fdeatured in the exhibition History's Big Picture, Monroe Gallery of Photography, through September 25.