EXCERPTS FROM AN EVENING OF PHOTOJOURNALISM

We were honored to welcome two  preeminent names in American journalism, former Time, Life, and People magazine editors Richard Stolley and Hal Wingo for an evening of conversation in the gallery in conjuction with the exhibition "History's Big Picture". The gallery was filled to standing room only as they talked about the power of magazine photography and photojournalism's past, present, and future.

A few excerpts from the evening:

Dick Stolley recounted the events surrounding President John F. Kennedy's assassination, and how he arrived in Dallas on the evening of the assassination and met early the next morning with Abraham Zapruder and secured the original and first-generation print of the "Zapruder film" for LIFE magazine. Stolley continued that he went to the County jail for the transfer of Lee Harvey Oswald, only to learn from a TV camerman that Jack Ruby had shot Oswald as he was leaving the City jail. Stolley then singled out Bob Jackson's Pulitzer-Prize winning photograph in the exhibition and continued:

"Two pictures were taken - a guy named Jack Beers shot a split-second earlier than Bob Jackson and the difference between the two photographs is profound. This captures everything and that split second before just missed. That split second is what makes the difference in so many of the photographs on these walls."

Both Stolley and Wingo covered stories in South during the most violent years of the Civil Rights struggle. Wingo told how he found assignments in the South scared him far more than any in Vietnam. They talked about the power oF the image, and the influence civil rights photographs had on American public opinion at the time.

Dick Stolley: "When LIFE showed up there were already a lot of writers covering the civil rights stories. It was one thing to write about segregationist crowds trying to prevent nine teenagers from going into Central High School, but when you showed these photographs of angry, contorted faces it made all the difference in two ways: one, in us understanding of what was going on in Little Rock and throughout the South, and two, the attitude the people in the photographs had.

It was one thing to be written about, it was a very different thing to wind up in the pages of LIFE magazine with your face contorted in rage...and they caught on to that instantly.

America saw these photograph and thought "Good God, what is happening?"

Hal Wingo continued: "I wonder if anyone here tonight might recognize this picture? Does it ring a bell in any of you?"

He held up this photograph, a double page spread from an old LIFE magazine:

These are the 18 men arrested, including County Deputy Cecil Price and his boss, Sheriff Lawrence Rainey, for the murders of three civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. These 18 men were arraigned not on on State charges, because Mississippi did not charge them, but on Federal charges of violating the rights of the three civil rights workers. This is the picture taken just after their arraignment...do they look worried?

They thought their ace in the hole was they would be judged locally, by a jury of their peers, and that's the safest thing that could happen"

On the state of photojournalism:

Photojournalism today maybe has a broader definition than just the creative work of talented photojournalists who can arrange or capture a moment that will be a lasting impression from these situations. It seems to me today photojournalism is any photograph that is in the sense journalism, that tells the story."  Dick Stolley

We would like to graciously thank Dick and Hal for a wonderful evening of discussion.

LUCILLE BALL AT 100

Irving Haberman: Lucille Ball as six differnt characters, Promo for CBS' "I Love Lucy"

August 6, 2011

Via Entertainment Weekly:

Lucille Ball would’ve turned 100 today, almost sixty years after I Love Lucy started cracking up TV viewers and never stopped. There isn’t much new to be said about Ball’s legacy: How she defined the modern sitcom, how she paved the way for every female comedy legend — from Mary Tyler Moore to Roseanne to Tina Fey — who came after her, how her show’s popularity has outlasted all its 1950s rivals (Gunsmoke, The Honeymooners) and is still a daytime TV staple around the world.

Instead, let’s let Lucy do the talking:  click here for film clips via Entertainment Weekly

Sid Avery: Lucille Ball on the set of "I Love Lucy", 1953

Loomis Dean: Dressed for an episode of I Love Lucy, Lucille Ball is spraying seltzer and about to place the pie in an unsuspecting face, 1952

Exhibit to showcase photojournalists' historic works; Discussion about the past, present and future of photojournalism

 

Robert Nott | The Santa Fe New Mexican
Friday, August 05, 2011

Photojournalists are the invisible documentarians of history; men and women who understand that their images will outlive them. We may all remember the classic black-and-white photo of a sailor kissing a woman in Times Square on VJ Day, 1945, but do we recall who shot it? (Alfred Eisenstaedt). Likewise, the image of Jack Ruby shooting presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald may remain indelibly imprinted in our minds, but do we know the name of the photographer? (Robert Jackson).

Monroe Gallery of Photography pays homage to the historical contributions made by photojournalists with both a photo exhibition called History's Big Picture and a public discussion with magazine editors Richard Stolley and Hal Wingo.

Both men worked as editors for Time, Life and People magazines, and the two will talk about the past, present and future of photojournalism at 5 p.m. Friday at Monroe Gallery on Don Gaspar Street.

"These are real moments captured by real people," Wingo said during a joint interview with Stolley at the gallery. "These were all done before the advent of Photoshop [computer software that allows manipulation of images]. These days you can't necessarily trust a picture."

Following up on that point, Stolley pointed to John Filo's photo of Mary Vecchio grieving over a slain student in the wake of the Kent State shootings in 1970 — an image hanging in the Monroe Gallery exhibition — and noted that a fence post seems to be protruding from Vecchio's head.

"Photoshop could erase that and probably make that a better picture, aesthetically, but it's not the truth," he said.

A lot of the images in the Monroe show suggest that photojournalism displays its power via tragic, sometimes bloody images — Eddie Adams's photo of South Vietnamese National Police Chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting a suspected Viet Cong in the head at close range, for instance, or Bill Eppridge's image of an Ambassador Hotel busboy attempting to help slain presidential candidate Robert Kennedy.

But, as Stolley points out, "There are moments of love that are caught as well," as with Ed Clark's moving photo of an accordion player weeping as President Franklin D. Roosevelt's funeral train passes by in Warm Springs, Ga.

Though these photojournalists were well trained and prepared to capture unexpected moments, luck and timing sometimes played a hand. Stolley tells the story of two photographers who were in the same place at the same time on the morning of Nov. 23, 1963.

That's when Dallas police were transferring President John F. Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, through the police headquarters basement on his way to jail. Nightclub owner Jack Ruby stepped out from the crowd and shot Ruby at close range just as photographer Robert Jackson took a photo. Jackson won a Pulitzer Prize for his efforts, but photographer Jack Beers caught nearly the same image on his camera — about half a second earlier.

"Two pictures were taken by two photographers that morning," Stolley said. "The first one (Beers) is just off; taken less than a second before the other. Jackson's is the photo that became famous."

Stolley and Wingo remember a number of photojournalists who gave their lives on the job: Robert Capa, who stepped on a land mine while covering the First Indochina War; Paul Schutzer, who was killed covering the Six-Day War in the Middle East, and Life photographer Larry Burrows, who died in a helicopter crash in Laos in 1971.

"He used up two 'nine lives' before he died," Wingo said of his colleague Burrows.

Both men feel that photojournalism remains a vibrant art form. "Young people would rather look at a picture than read," Stolley said, pointing to the success of life.com, which offers more than 10 million photos on its site.

And photojournalism does not have to rely on the written word to tell its story.

"You didn't have to say or write anything," Wingo said. "The photo says everything you want to know. The fact that it captures a moment that is frozen in time stays with you."

If you go:

What: Time, Life and People editors Richard Stolley and Hal Wingo discuss History's Big Picture

When: 5-7 p.m. Friday

Where: Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar Ave., 992-0800.

Admission: Free

Seating is first-come, first-served. The photo exhibit runs through September 25.

Related: '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.'

Review: Iconic Consciousness

STEPHEN WILKES BLENDS DAY INTO NIGHT

Times Square, Day To Night 2010

 September, 2011
 PDN Magazine
 By Jacqueline Tobin

The photographer discusses his new project in which he explores the concept of “changing time” in a single photograph.

OVER THE LAST SEVERAL YEARS, DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY TECHNOLOGY HAS REACHED a point where you can create almost any thing you dream up. For Stephen Wilkes this meant turning his fascination with the passage of time within a single photograph into a full-scale, fine-art project titled “Day Into Night.” It comprises digital composites he outputs as limited edition, gallery prints sized at 30 x 40 and 48 x 60 inches. Wilkes made the first image in the series in 2009 when he was on assignment for New York Magazine in downtown Manhattan. The job required him to shoot the expanse of public park known as the High Line that had been built on the site of the 1.45-mile-long elevated rail structure running on the city’s West Side.

To get the shot he wanted—an epic overview of the High Line that still retained intimacy and a human connection—Wilkes photographed from about 40 or 50 feet off the ground in a cherry picker. (Initially, he scouted several nearby rooftops to shoot from but the view lacked both the intimacy and broad scale of the area that he was in search of.)

Using a 4 x 5 camera with a 39-megapixel digital back, Wilkes rotated his camera manually—because the scene was so expansive as it moved from south to north— from atop a tripod throughout the day. He shot hundreds of moments unfolding before him. He kept a constant f-stop but varied the shutter speed to allow for proper exposure as the sun eventually set. Periodically he and his assistant, who was also in the cherry picker, would load images onto a laptop and start creating rough comps to make sure he was getting what he needed.

The final panorama, edited down to between 30 and 50 images and blended seamlessly together in Photoshop, conveys a gradual shift from day to night. What begins on the left side of the image as a warm, bright day filled with picnickers, pedestrians and the blur of traffic below blends toward the right into a dark, somewhat desolate space void of people but eerily lit up by the glow of nearby buildings and lamp posts.

"My favorite thing as an artist is to create a print that actually gives the viewer a visceral experience when they see it,” says Wilkes. “I continue that experience with ‘Day Into Night.’ ”

 Wilkes photographs from one camera angle continually for up to 15 hours, then edits down the work to 25 or 30 select shots that are digitally blended into one photograph to capture what he says are “the fleeting moments throughout the day and night.”

Wilkes says he first thought about the idea of using multiple exposures to photograph time shifts while shooting for LIFE magazine on the set of director Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet in 1996. The magazine had asked him to create a panoramic gatefold but when he arrived on the set, he realized that the set was actually a huge square. “I decided to take the square and break it apart, à la David Hockney, using individual images,” says Wilkes. “I ended up shooting over 250 images that I then pasted together by hand.”

Wilkes explains that the aspect of passing time came into play in the center of the photograph. There, the stars (Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes) hugged as other actors surrounded them. “To the right side of the photograph was a huge mirror, probably 20 or 30 feet in height, and I asked them to kiss for the reflection image,” Wilkes explains. “That reflection does not match the center embrace and when you look at the photograph quickly you think the image in the mirror is a reflection. But then you realize that the reflection is a time change and a completely different moment. That idea stayed with me.”

A successful commercial shooter, Wilkes has embraced large-format photography in his fine-art work, “because it gives my all-important details greater depth,” he notes. “So much of my work is about levels of story.” That work includes his ethereal, haunting color series of images of neglected buildings on Ellis Island ( Ghosts of Freedom, W. W. Norton & Company, 2006); the dismantled and decaying factory scenes of Bethlehem Steel in Pennsylvania; his series of large-format photographs portraying victims of Hurricane Katrina (“In Katrina’s Wake: Restoring a Sense of Place”); and his three projects on China (“Old and New,” “Factories,” and “Three Gorges Dam”).

“My favorite thing as an artist is to create a print that actually gives the viewer a visceral experience when they see it,” says Wilkes. “I continue that experience with ‘Day Into Night.’ ” In the center of the High Line frame, for example, one can see several children pressed up against a glass partition of an overpass as they watch what’s going on below at street level and it’s easy to imagine their sense of awe and wonderment. Behind them are people sitting, eating, napping, texting on their phones and so on. Keep panning out and more and more of the surrounding buildings and sky broaden the scene and you feel the gradual shift from day to night just as it would happen in real life.

“I’ve been told the images have a Bruegel-like quality,” says Wilkes, who actually studied the Flemish painter’s famed landscape series “The Harvesters” which emphasized not just a time of year and the labors of the period, but the atmosphere and transformation of the landscape itself. “I love Bruegel’s scale, and the idea that he was able to do these epic views yet you could see these workers laboring within the depth of these wheat fields, all busy doing different things, and you could almost read their body language, you could almost feel the breath coming out of their lungs as they were lifting these heavy loads,” Wilkes describes. “I love that.”

He says that during his shoots he loves grabbing fleeting moments, and scanning “every inch of this enormous frame using extreme wide angle perspectives but within that context you can read body language and gesture.” He no longer rotates his camera, as he did during the High Line shoot, but instead establishes perspective, locks it in and doesn’t move the camera for the next 10 to 15 hours. He stays focused on a scene and grabs very specific moments. He even shuts the power off in the cherry picker so it stays still as well. Then he photographs one scene through his lens over and over. “With the new computers on the market today we can now multitask. My assistant usually begins a rough comp on location in Photoshop, and I’m still able capture images simultaneously.” On average he shoots 1,000 images and takes a very specifically edited group of what he considers unique moments during all times of day and night.

Since the High Line shoot he has been all over Manhattan continuing his pursuit of what he describes as “quintessential city portraits.” They include views of Times Square, Central Park in the winter, the Flatiron building and adjacent pedestrian mall (done last year on 9/11 to capture the beams of light from the memorial), Washington Square Park (located in the heart of Greenwich Village), and Gramercy Park (a private park between East 20th and 21st streets off of Park Avenue South). What he loves about shooting in and around Manhattan, he explains, is that there is an abundance of iconic views that meld his love of pure street photography and shooting iconic landscapes.

Central Park, Day To Night, 2010

 

His most recent shoot took place at Gramercy Park this past July. The foreground element of the fence was very important for him to capture, he says, because he wanted to define it as a very private park. “Developing the relationships between the foreground, the middle ground and the background are crucial here,” Wilkes explains. “I’m striving to capture the scope and the epic quality of the city and so I’m working on many different levels. It’s very challenging when you get up there because if you move a foot one way or a foot another way everything changes. It’s a structured process but it can also be a very dynamic, freefalling process. I never know who or what might appear in my frame.”
Wilkes says the nine images he’s created so far will be exhibited for the first time as a series, output at 48 x 60 inches, at ClampArt Gallery in Manhattan this month (the show opens on September 8 and runs through October 29).

At press time Wilkes and his wife, Bette who is also his producer, were already firming up plans and securing permits to shoot at Coney Island. “I have the best seat in the house, I really do,” he says, “and the best part is, no one really looks up or knows I am up there looking down on them. I have become the ultimate voyeur.”

 Via Photo District News

“My Faraway One: The Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz"

Credit: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Alfred Stieglitz attached this photograph to a letter for Georgia O'Keeffe, dated July 10, 1929. Below the photograph he wrote, "I have destroyed 300 prints to-day. And much more literature. I haven't the heart to destroy this..."


 Kathaleen Roberts / Journal Staff Writer
Wednesday, Aug 3, 2011

It was a relationship built on white-hot passion, nearly shattered on a fault line of freedom and creativity.

National Gallery of Art photography curator Sarah Greenough leafed through 25,000 pieces of paper exchanged by Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz to produce “My Faraway One: The Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Volume I, 1915-1933,” (Yale University Press, 2011) an 800-page tome as big as the Chicago phone book. Despite its girth, the book represents just one-tenth of their correspondence during this period.

Greenough will be at the New Mexico Museum of Art today to talk about the book.

When Stieglitz and O’Keeffe met in 1916, he was 52 and already considered the nucleus of the New York art world. She was an unknown 28-year-old Texas art teacher.
The book traces the pair’s correspondence –– hers in squiggles and curlicues, his in thick black lines –– across their relationship. Stieglitz became entranced by her work when introduced to it by O’Keeffe’s friend Anita Pollitzer. The couple frequently exchanged three to four letters a day. They were sealed, at O’Keeffe’s request, for 20 years after her death.
At first, O’Keeffe comes across as a smitten schoolgirl turned giddy by the attentions of a powerful man. Stieglitz, alternately charismatic, egotistical and narcissistic, yearned for a woman artist after spending years in a miserable first marriage.
“You can see them really starting to fall in love,” Greenough said.
Stieglitz, the man who had introduced Constantin Brancusi, Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso to the U.S., had long been searching for a great woman artist. He was convinced he had found one in O’Keeffe.
“In the early letters, you see him just getting to know her,” Greenough said. “I think he strongly wanted to encourage her art. Yet, eventually in the correspondence, his fascination with her as a woman artist gets transferred into his fascination of her as a woman.”
By 1916, Stieglitz was writing letters that were 20 to 30 pages long.
As O’Keeffe was about to return to Texas in 1917, he wrote to her: “How I wanted to photograph you –– the hands –– the mouth –– & eyes –– & the enveloped in black body –– the touch of white –– & the throat –– but I didn’t want to break into your time.”
Before O’Keeffe moved to New York in 1918, he wrote, “What do I want from you? –– Sometimes I feel I’m going stark mad –– That I ought to say.”
“They pretty much fell in love through their correspondence,” Greenough said.
Stieglitz found and cleaned a small studio for O’Keeffe. They began living together almost immediately and married in 1924.
By the mid-’20s, cracks start to snake through their bond. O’Keeffe desperately wanted a child; Stieglitz –– already the father of a daughter –– did not. She wanted to travel; he was a dedicated New Yorker. At first, the couple lived with Stieglitz’s brother and his wife. O’Keeffe later wrote that “living with the brother and the wife had all the emotional warmth of a cold, damp cellar.”
The family also intruded on her time to paint.
“And she wanted to live a more independent life than Stieglitz wanted her to,” Greenough said.
Thanks in no small part to Stieglitz’s promotion, O’Keeffe became a famous artist. Restless, she made the trip that would transform both their lives.
In 1929, O’Keeffe traveled to New Mexico to visit Mabel Dodge Luhan in Taos. She discovered a vast expanse of land and light that would flood her canvas. She was surrounded by a circle of artists and intellectuals, including Tony Lujan, D.H. Lawrence and Dorothy Brett.
“This really isn’t like anything you ever saw,” she wrote to Stieglitz from Taos in 1929. “Mabel’s place beats anything you can imagine about it –– it is simply astonishing.”
The letters offer glimpses of O’Keeffe’s take on her own paintings:
“I hate the back of my Ranchos church –– Tomorrow I must get out at it again –– It is heavy –– I want it to be light and lovely and singing.”
The cascading letters reveal the couple’s contrasting writing styles. Stieglitz’s is flowing and poetic, teeming with imagery. O’Keeffe paired phrases with squiggles and loops. “It’s almost as if she was … sketching out an idea.” Greenough said. “O’Keeffe is very lucid and very sharply rendered, like her paintings are distilled down to their essence.”
“Neither one of them cared about sending carefully crafted letters,” she added. “They’re very immediate and free-flowing.”
Greenough first met O’Keeffe through photographs –– the sparsely iconic black-and-white images by Stieglitz, the subject of the curator’s dissertation. Greenough organized one-man exhibitions of the acclaimed photographer at the National Gallery of Art. O’Keeffe asked Greenough to edit their correspondence. She annotated each letter with a “yes” or a “no” for publication.
“When I met her, it was an extremely different person than the one in the photographs,” Greenough said. “She had a very dry wit and a real twinkle in her eyes. She was definitely a strong-willed person.”
Greenough is at work on Volume II, which runs from 1934 to Stieglitz’s 1946 death.
“I think it probably won’t be nearly as long,” she said.

If you go WHAT: Sarah Greenough, author of “My Faraway One: The Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Volume I, 1915-1933″
WHEN: 6 p.m. today
WHERE: St. Francis Auditorium, New Mexico Museum of Art, 107 W. Palace Ave.
COST: Free
CONTACT: 476-5088

Via The Albuquerque Journal

Related: NPR - Stieglitz And O'Keeffe: Their Love And Life In Letters

Ken Regan Releases ALL ACCESS Photography Book



Monday, August 1, 2011
BWW News Desk


Ken Regan was there when the Beatles touched down on U.S. soil for the first time in 1964. He caught candid snapshots of their arrival at JFK International Airport in New York City, photographed their backstage downtime at the Ed Sullivan Show and spent a day clowning around with the Fab Four in Central Park.

This is what you call access-the type of proximity and intimacy with artists that have made Regan's images sought-after windows to the most historically significant moments in the last 40 years of rock and roll.

And with his exceptional new book, All Access: The Rock and Roll Photography of Ken Regan, Regan grants you, a little taste of that backstage wonderment.

He palled around with the Stones in 1975 in Montauk. He took Dylan's favorite picture of himself. He hit the gym with Madonna in 1985. He's ridden shotgun with Run DMC in Hollis, Queens.
"I was able to catch many legendary rock pioneers at ease," Regan writes. And as readers will note, it is Regan's "interest in doing more than just photo ops and concert shoots" that delivers some of the most remarkable cultural documents of the past half-century.

All Access is a collection of photographs, but more than that, it is a compilation of memories, stories from the front lines of several revolutions: the rock revolution; Pete Seeger's peace movement and Woodstock ("a photographer's paradise"); and the birth of hip hop.

"As a photojournalist, there were thousands of assignments that I covered over the last four decades," say Regan. "I am forever grateful."
But don't take Ken's word for it.

"You have to know the moment before it happens. To sense it, to feel it," Keith Richards writes in the book's preface. "Whatever this intuitive sense, is what my longtime friend has. Many times I've been onstage only to see Ken's beady left eye drilling through me with that wry grin under his camera and know he's got the shot he was after."

The Stones are generous in their praise of Regan. And Regan is generous with his experience. In the book, he gives readers never-before-heard insider accounts of dozens of events and over 40 artists, for example:

- Woodstock on stage and off
- When Bob Dylan met a young fan named Bruce Springsteen- On and off the road with The Rolling Stones throughout the 70's and the 80's
- Hanging out with his "Big Brother" Bill Graham, who introduced him to Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Stones and Bob Dylan
- The Concert for Bangladesh
- Roy Orbison and Johnny Cash in quiet moments at home with their families
- Backstage at Live Aid and Amnesty International

Regan gives the fly-on-the-wall account that only he can give: Just like his photographs, his writing is direct, honest and unclouded by obsequious fandom.

"When you look at the breadth of Ken's work, the first thought is, 'He could not have possibly shot all these'," James Taylor writes in the afterword. "Looking at Ken's remarkable catalog of images, I am reminded of a time when we did not know more about our favorite musicians than we wanted to know. Perhaps that's why we stuck with them  longer."

It certainly gives us reasons--hundreds of them, in both vivid color and intimate black-and-white--to stick with Ken Regan.

About the Author(s):
Ken Regan is an award-winning photographer whose work has appeared on more than 200 magazine covers, including Time, New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, People, Newsweek, Life, and Entertainment Weekly. He visually documented such extraordinary concerts as The Band's Last Waltz and George Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh. His previous photography book, Knockout: The Art of Boxing, earned an Independent Book Publishers Gold Medal Award. Regan lives in New York and Massachusetts.

Jim Jerome has coauthored a number of best-selling memoirs, collaborating with leading figures in popular music, film, television, cable news, and business. He has also profiled hundreds of rock, pop, country music, film, and television artists for People, Us, InStyle, and AARP magazines. He lives in New York.


Read more: http://books.broadwayworld.com/article/Ken-Regan-Releases-ALL-ACCESS-Photography-Book-20110801#ixzz1TtSLoSUc

Museum Admission: $$, Your Local Galleries: Free

Last week, the Museum of Modern Art announced that, " faced with what it calls “escalating costs in virtually all aspects of operating the museum,’’ it  is raising its admission price to $25 for adults from $20 effective September 1. This follows the same increase for the "suggested" admission price to the Metropolitan Museum of Art effective July 1.

The change has elicited some protest from observers who complain that the museum is too expensive already. But others acknowledge the difficult realities of museum financing.

All in all, remember that your local galleries offer free admission and similar opportunities to experience world-class art.

REVIEW: "ICONIC CONSCIOUSNESS"



Eric Smith: Funeral for Iraq War Soldier, Lake Orion, Michigan, 2006

By Maylin Wilson Powell
The Albuquerque Journal
July 29, 2011

In our current era of citizen journalism, when amateur submissions are used on Internet news sites, technology and media consolidation have rendered the work of professional photojournalists a much more contingent endeavor. There is, of course, great value in the kind of rousing images that were taken by young women with cellphones during the heat of Egypt’s uprising and transmitted instantaneously around the planet. But, what of the men and women who consistently invested in firsthand photographic reporting over a number of years? The number of photojournalism images published by news organizations has shrunk dramatically in the shift of emphasis to more entertainment and lifestyle coverage. Without courageous and seasoned photojournalists actually going and talking to and taking pictures of people during the eruptions of wars and revolutions, our understanding of the world becomes more and more distorted.

“History’s Big Picture” exhibition at the Monroe Gallery of Photography is a gripping selection of images that brings home the power of visual storytelling. Hung chronologically from the 1930s to the present, these 58 photo images by the masters of 20th and 21st century photojournalism are predominately sobering. The overall impression of history and the big picture presented here tells a collective story of “Woe is us.”

More than a third of the images are from what is known as the “Golden Age” of photojournalism, the 1930s to the 1950s, when magazines including LIFE, Look and Sports Illustrated (USA), Paris Match, and the Berliner Illustrierte Zetung along with newspapers The Daily Mirror (London) and The New York Daily News built huge reputations and circulations based on photography by such artists as Robert Capa, Alfred Eisenstaedt and Margaret Bourke-White. The show opens with the work of these three celebrity photojournalists, including Eisenstaedt’s image of the self-satisfied architects of fascism, “The First Meeting of Mussolini and Hitler, Venice, June 1934,” along with an especially chilling image of the vampirish “Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Geneva, September, 1933,” the Reich’s minister of propaganda, himself a failed journalist and writer who organized the 1938 Kristallnacht for burning books and synagogues.

Capa’s “D-Day, Normandy, Omaha Beach, 1944″ is actually a great watery blur of a soldier swimming toward such massive implements for killing as fortified tank turrets and hundreds of thousands of land mines. Bourke-White is represented by two images –– the first captures three raggedy children in front of a raggedy sign that announces “Entering New Deal, Montana, 1936,” which was a mini-boomtown that faded away in the 1940s after the completion of a federally financed dam. Her second image is a riveting, crowded composition of “Buchenwald Prisoners, 1945″ each of them staring directly at us and still pressing forward across more than half a century from behind a metal fence on the day of their liberation. Scanning their figures and faces, it brings into question what the concepts of liberation and survival could mean to every one of these individuals and their descendants.

On view are five iconic images that were seen on the front pages of newspapers around the world the day after they were shot on location. In the case of Joe Rosenthal’s “Marines Raise the Flag on Iwo Jima, February 23, 1945,” the U.S. government also printed 3.5 million posters for free distribution, and this image was certainly the template for Thomas E. Franklin’s raising of the flag by “Firefighters at Ground Zero, Sept 11, 2001.”

As the gallery notes, other justly famous images of the turbulent and troubled 1960s still “shake and disquiet us,” including Robert Jackson’s “Jack Ruby Shoots Lee Harvey Oswald, November 24, 1964,” Eddie Adams’ “Execution in Saigon, South Vietnam, February 1, 1968,” John Olson’s “U.S. Marines at battle of Hue, Vietnam, 1968,” and Bill Eppridge’s assassination of Bobby Kennedy in 1968.

Mixed in with these images that are part of the collective consciousness of baby boomers and assembled to celebrate the gallery’s 10th year in Santa Fe (after 14 years in Manhattan) are many images that are no less powerful but that have never before been exhibited on gallery walls. All of the conventions of fine art composition and framing are deployed by these masters in the heat of the “decisive moment.” Cameras are angled upward to frame such famous men as Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. as towering presences. Ground level shots with strong diagonals that signal things gone seriously awry including Eppridge’s splayed, spot-lit pieta of Bobby Kennedy attended by a waiter on bended knee, Loomis Dean’s tilting blasted “Mannequins after nuclear test at Yucca Flats, Nevada, May 1955,” and John Filo’s “May Vecchio grieving over slain student, Kent State, May 1970.” Unflinching, upright, straight-ahead perspective confers dignity and gives the viewer a place of privilege in such heart-wrenching situations as Ed Clark’s image of a tear-stained African American accordionist “Navy CPO Graham Jackson playing” a dirge for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s funeral cortege.

Sixties minimalism is used to great effect in Steve Schapiro’s austere and stripped-to-the-essential “White Women, Arkansas, 1961,” and in Eric Smith’s somber empty auditorium “Funeral for Iraqi War soldier, Lake Orion, Michigan, 2006.” Like Hiroshi Sugimoto’s late-1970s empty “Theatres” lit only by a streaming movie projector, Smith’s flag-draped, centrally illuminated casket with no one in attendance is an eerie metaphor, in this case, of offshore deaths that are intended to be kept out of sight and out of mind. In 2003, the Bush administration summarily banned all coverage of the bodies of U.S. troops returning from Iraq, a ban that was lifted in February 2009.

 Hadai Mizban: Iraq "War Games", Baghdad, Iraq, July 2, 2007 (c. AP)

That the gallery is almost always crowded with people talking about these images is due to a multitude of factors. The core reason is the consummate talent, quick response and fortitude of photojournalists working in often terrifying situations where their cameras make them prime targets. Are all those young viewers, who never had the opportunity to see them in print, a testimony to their thirst for truth, rather than entertainment? Certainly, it also has to do with the central location and welcoming open door of Monroe Gallery, a valuable addition to Santa Fe and a recognized international and persistent player in recovering and encouraging the best photojournalism.

In conjunction with this exhibition, the gallery is sponsoring an evening of conversation, next Friday, August 5, from 5 to 7 p.m., between two American photojournalists turned editors, Richard Stolley and Hal Wingo.

If you go WHAT: “History’s Big Picture”
WHERE: Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don GasparÂ
WHEN: Through Sept. 25.
HOURS: Monday through Saturday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Sunday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
CONTACT: 505.992-0800 or info@monroegallery.com

Carl Mydans:  Demonstrators in a Works Progress Administration (WPA) Strike, 1937 (c.Time Inc.)



Read more: ABQJournal Online » Photos Capture History http://www.abqjournal.com/main/2011/07/29/north/photos-capture-history.html#ixzz1TUabZmqX
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JEROME LIEBLING, 1924 - 2011: "My concern is with the very structure of the picture"

Via Star-Tribune


Former Minnesota photographer Jerome Liebling, 87, who profoundly influenced the state's professional photography community during two decades teaching at the University of Minnesota, died July 27 in Northhampton, Mass.

Liebling taught at the University of Minnesota from 1949 to 1969. After serving with the 82nd Airborne in Europe during World War II, he had studied design and photography at Brooklyn College and then film production at the New School for Social Research in New York City. He was hired by the U. of Mn. to teach photography at a time when colleges were expanding their art and theater departments in response to a flood of returning G.I.s.

His early black-and-white photos were shaped by his common touch and deeply humanistic instincts. Politicians were a favorite Minnesota subjects, especially DFLers for whom he was the unofficial documentarian. Two of his six books also pay tribute to his Minnesota years: "The Face of Minneapolis" (Dillon Press, 1966) and "Jerome Liebling: The Minnesota Photographs" (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1997).
“He always had a deep love for Minnesota, and a special interest in working folks,” said his daughter Tina Liebling, a lawyer and DFL state representative from Rochester.

Among Liebling’s favorite photos was one of then U.S. senator Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy, then a Minnesota DFL Representative in Congress, at a baseball game in 1958. A decade later in the midst of the Vietman War, Liebling had that photo printed up as a poster and, with Tina, sold it on the street outside the Chicago convention hall in which Humphrey was nominated as the Democratic candidate for president, and McCarthy — as the anti-war candidate — mounted a bitter challenge that split the Democratic party and led to the election of Republican Richard Nixon as president.

My father served in the military during World War II and had a profound dislike of anything militaristic," said his daughter, Tina. "I wouldn't say he was a total pacifist, but he certainly was against the Vietnam War."

Jerome Liebling at Minnesota Center for Photography, Star Tribune staff photo by Marlin Levison

Jerome Liebling at Minnesota Center for Photography in 2006. (Star Tribune photo by Marlin Levison)

The Brooklyn-born photographer had lived in Amherst, Mass. since 1969 when he moved there to start a film, photography and video program at fledgling Hampshire College. An alternative school that emphasizes independent projects and student initiative, Hampshire had not even opened when Liebling arrived to interview for the job.
Graced by a wide ranging intellect and infectious interest in student work, he became a popular figure at Hampshire where he is memorialized in the recently renovated Jerome Liebling Center for Film, Photography and Video. Filmmaker Ken Burns is the most famous of his many Hampshire students. He taught there for 21 years before retiring at age 67 in 1990.

"As an educator, Jerry influenced a whole generation of filmmakers, many of whom studied here at Hampshire," the college said in a statement announcing his death. "In addition to his artistry, the legacy he leaves us is that of a gifted teacher, beloved mentor, and dear friend and colleague."

He is survived by his second wife Rebecca Nordstrom, a dancer; five children from his first marriage, which ended in divorce; and five grandchildren. The children, all surnamed Liebling, are Madeline (Mark Liebow) of Shelburne Falls, Mass.; Tina (Mark Liebow) of Rochester, Mn.; Adam of Cambridge, Mass.; Daniella (James Lane) of Brooklyn, N.Y; Rachael Jane of Brooklyn.

The now-defunct Minnesota Center for Photography staged a quasi-retrospective, "Jerome Liebling: Selected Photographs" in 2006. It sampled more than five decades of his career in about 70 images, many of them presenting working-class subjects with sympathetic but unsentimental dignity.

"My concern is with the very structure of the picture," Liebling told the Star Tribune in 2006. "Everything has to count, but basically it's an effort to get close to the world and to reflect it. The better I do that, the more sympathy and humanity is present."

Reviews: "A great collector discerns quality before anyone else notices it"

Monroe, Brando Ooze Hollywood Glamour in London Exhibition: Martin Gayford

Via Bloomberg


A great collector discerns quality before anyone else notices it.


John Kobal (1940-1991) was in Los Angeles in the 1960s at a time when the Hollywood studios were clearing out their libraries of still photographs. Kobal often was invited to take his pick, according to his friend the critic John Russell Taylor. At other times, he was tipped off when the images were being dumped so he would follow and fill his car.

Some of those gleanings can be seen in “Glamour of the Gods: Photographs From the John Kobal Foundation” at the National Portrait Gallery (through Oct. 23) in London. Here are glittering divas and handsome movie heroes from Gloria Swanson to Marilyn Monroe. By Monroe’s era, Kobal’s enthusiasm was running out. He was a star-struck romantic, and in his view the “gods” and “titans” of Hollywood belonged to the ‘20s and the ‘30s.

 

 "Elizabeth Taylor" (1948) by Clarence Sinclair Bull. The photograph is on display in "Glamour of the Gods" at the National Portrait Gallery in London until Oct 24. Source: National Portrait Gallery via Bloomberg


Those publicity shots he rescued are partly performance art. Joan Crawford told Kobal, “I photographed better than I looked so it was easy for me… I let myself go before the camera.” The result, in an MGM still from 1933 by Clarence Sinclair Bull, was a blend of regal beauty and emotional intimacy.

Crawford and the others were doing what they did best, acting to camera. The studio photographers were deploying, often brilliantly, all the arts of traditional portraiture: lighting, composition, costume and flattery. The latter took the form of extensive retouching.

Worry Lines

There’s a telling comparison between shots of Crawford by George Hurrell in 1930, before and after this treatment. Au naturel, she has worry lines and freckles -- still beautiful, yet vulnerably human. No goddess. This brings out a truth: The histories of painting and photography have always been closely intertwined (all the more so today thanks to Photoshop). These photographs are altered by hand-painting; conversely, of course, painters often use photography as a tool.

 

Clark Gable and Joan Crawford "Dancing Lady" (1933) by George Hurrell. The photograph is on display in "Glamour of the Gods" at the National Portrait Gallery in London until Oct 24. Source: National Portrait Gallery via Bloomberg



“Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography in the 20th Century,” an outstanding exhibition at the Royal Academy (until Oct. 2), demonstrates the same point in a different way. Robert Capa, one of the major photographers included, once remarked, “It’s not enough to have talent, you also have to be Hungarian.” That was a backhanded way of emphasizing how many masters of the camera emerged from Hungary betweeen 1920 and 1940.

 

"Satiric Dancer" (1926) by Andre Kertesz. The photograph is on show in "Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography in the Twentieth Century" at the Royal Academy in London until Oct. 2. Source: Royal Academy via Bloomberg


Just why that Central European nation was so photographically fertile is hard to say. What the major figures -- Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Brassai, Martin Munkacsi and Andre Kertesz -- had in common was modernism. They use the same tight geometrical structure and pared-down forms as a painter such as Mondrian, whose studio apartment was the subject of a marvelous photograph by Kertesz.

Line and Energy

Moholy-Nagy actually was an abstract artist as well as a photographer. Munkacsi’s “Four Boys at Lake Tanganyika” (1930) has the fluent line and bounding energy of a Matisse, found in the real world and recorded in a split second (this image inspired Cartier-Bresson’s whole career). A few years later, Munkacsi went to the U.S. and began the modern tradition of fashion photography, an artificial art if ever there was one.

Four Boys at Lake Tanganyika" by Martin Munkacsi. The photograph is on show in "Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography in the Twentieth Century" at the Royal Academy in London until Oct. 2. Source: Royal Academy via Bloomberg


If the actual scene didn’t quite have the correct arrangement of lines and surfaces, these photographers might adjust it. Kertesz moved Mondrian’s vase to create the right curve, while Capa may have staged his celebrated and endlessly controversial “Death of a Loyalist Militiaman” (1936).

That possibility only bothers those who confuse photography and truth. Like the still of Crawford sans freckles, Capa’s image of a falling Spanish Republican isn’t raw reality. It’s art.

“Glamour of the Gods: Photographs From the John Kobal Foundation” is at the National Portrait Gallery, London, through Oct. 23. Information: http://www.npg.org.uk.

“Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography in the 20th Century” is at the Royal Academy until Oct. 2, see http://www.royalacademy.org.uk. For more on the foundation: http://www.johnkobal.org/.

(Martin Gayford is chief art critic for Muse, the arts and leisure section of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer on the story: Martin Gayford in London at martin.gayford@googlemail.com or http://twitter.com/#!/martingayford.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Beech at mbeech@bloomberg.net.