Today in News History: June 21, 1964: Three civil rights workers disappeared in Philadelphia, Miss.

Today in News History: June 21, 1964: Three civil rights workers disappeared in Philadelphia, Miss. Their bodies were found buried in an earthen dam six weeks later.


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

“I once saw her taking a picture inside a refuse can. I never remotely thought that what she was doing would have some special artistic value.”

Self Portrait, February 1955   ©Maloof Collection

Self-Portrait in a Sheet Mirror: On Vivian Maier
Via The Nation

"We can’t know the full story behind this self-portrait, or behind the many thousands of images left in a storage locker in Chicago. But we can look at the range of Maier’s work and see the tantalizing evidence of artistry and ambition, and we can look at the expression of the woman reflected in the sheet mirror and see her indisputable pleasure. This is no frumpy old bird woman looking at her own pathetic destiny. This is a woman who knows what she wants, who has chosen to do her work free of judgment and commerce, and who is in charge of the scene."  Full article here.

WORLD REFUGEE DAY 2012

Eddie Adams: Boat of no smiles, Vietnamese Refugees, Gulf of Siam, Thanksgiving Day,1977



Theme for 2012: Refugees have no choice. You do.

THE BOAT OF NO SMILES

 Here’s my story: in early 1977 I noticed a couple of paragraphs in the New York Times about people escaping from Vietnam. Associated Press had just signed me up with carte blanche to cover the whole world, and complete editorial control. (The first person before or since to get it–that was the deal I made with them.) And I went to the president and said, "Boat people. Here’s a story I want to do," and started making calls all through Southeast Asia to AP bureaus to find out more. No one, no country, was letting the refugees land. You couldn’t even find out about them. At first, I went back and said the story was impossible to cover. Then I had an idea and got in touch with the Thai Marine police (I knew Thailand very well) who had been shoving the boats right back offshore to certain death. I told them would like to go with them on patrol in the Gulf of Siam. They OK’d it, so we headed for the most likely point in northern Thailand, getting there at 4am when a refugee boat had just pulled in; the Thai authorities were getting ready to cast it off again. It was Thanksgiving Day in 1977. I suddenly asked the Vietnamese if I could go with them— I bought gas and rice – they had no fuel or food. There were forty-nine people aboard that fishing boat, including children— in the hold that same day a baby was born. The Thais towed us back out to sea and set us adrift. On that boat, there was no room to lie down, so they all had to sit up straight, waking or sleeping. I cannot describe the despair. There were dramatic pictures of mothers with half-dead children in their arms but something even worse was there. Whenever you go to refugee camps in a war zone where terrible things have happened, where bodies might be stacked up, and disease everywhere, you still find children who gather before the camera with a smile. This was the first time in my life that no child smiled. I called the pictures, "the boat of no smiles." The boat was hardly moving- they didn’t even know where to go. Then we were approached by another Thai boat with a megaphone ordering me off at gunpoint— they were afraid someone would let them dock knowing there was an American aboard. I had mixed feelings about getting off. I wrote the story and sent the pictures immediately, and they ran. Peter Arnett did a story also and a few others. Within a couple of days the administration asked the AP to present the photos to Congress. And Carter said let them come to America. The Congress had been thinking about it, sure, but the pictures did it, pushed it over. To me that was the only thing I ever done that I cared about, valued. Pictures do work, at least sometimes. They carry conviction. Go back to the pictures in Speak Truth to Power and you can look at them in another way. These people, those faces, are the person next door. These are real people, and the pictures prove that no one made this up– they are the evidence that they exist. Ordinary people, doing extraordinary things.  --Eddie Adams

Related: Forthcoming Exhibition -

                        People Get Rady: The Struggle For Human Rights

                        July 6 - September 23, 2012

LIFE : Robert Kennedy dying by Bill Eppridge

Dying Robert Kennedy by Bill Eppridge © 1968 Time Inc



"I looked, and I did something that you should never do. I didn't take a picture."


-- Bill Eppridge



Via La Lettre de la Photographie

FATHER'S DAY, 2012

Guy Gillette: Arnolds, Cafe, Lovelady, Texas, 1956

You can thank Richard Nixon for making Father's Day and official holiday.

Related: Happy Father's Day 2011

FLAG DAY, 2012

Bill Eppridge: White Barn, New Preston, CT, 2007

The History of Flag Day

100 books, 56 cameras and 6,000 photographs

100 books, 56 cameras and 6,000 photographs

Pinhole Resource Collection Joins the History Museum’s

Palace of the Governors Photo Archives

Santa Fe (June 13, 2012)—Mysterious, artistic, and as low-tech as an oatmeal box, pinhole photography has captivated everyone from schoolchildren to professional photographers for more than a century. The Pinhole Resource Archives, the world’s largest collection of images, books and cameras, just joined New Mexico’s largest archive of photography, the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives at the New Mexico History Museum.

The collection was a donation from Pinhole Resource Inc., which is based in New Mexico and led by Eric Renner and Nancy Spencer.

“In looking at other possible repositories for the Pinhole Resource Collection, we felt the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives had a tremendous web presence, which would make the collection accessible to people worldwide,” Renner and Spencer said in a prepared statement. “In addition, with the staff’s enthusiasm and interest in pinhole images we felt the collection would have a good home here in New Mexico."

The Photo Archives has already digitized hundreds of the images, which can be searched here (http://econtent.unm.edu/cdm4/indexpg.php ); click on “Browse Pinhole Resource Collection” or type the word “Pinhole” into the search box. In 2014, the museum will mount an exhibition, Poetics of Light, celebrating pinhole photography.

 “The Photo Archives and the state of New Mexico is fortunate to be the repository for this world-class collection of pinhole photography. There is no other collection like it and is a tremendous addition to the resources made available to the public through the Photo Archives,” said archivist Daniel Kosharek.

Even in this digital age, pinhole photography remains an intriguing medium. Its popularity has been celebrated every April since 2001 with Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day. The 2010 event drew 3,387 images from 67 countries.

An exhibition of images from this unparalleled collection of pinhole photographs, representing images from New Mexico and around the world, is scheduled for April 2014 at the New Mexico History Museum. Poetics of Light will coincide with Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day.

In the 5^th century BC, a Chinese philosopher noted the inverted image produced through a pinhole—an effect that led to development of the camera obscura and serves as the fundamental quality of pinhole photography. Renaissance artists Leonardo da Vinci, Filippo Brunelleschi, and Leon Battista Alberti advanced the knowledge of pinhole camera obscura imagery, creating a basis and understand of one-point perspective. In 1850, Sir David Brewster, a Scottish scientist, took the first photograph with a pinhole camera. By the mid-1980s, a variety of pinhole cameras could be purchased by anyone who wanted to create images without creating the camera.

In its most simple description, a pinhole camera is a lens-less camera with a small aperture. The interior of the “camera” (which can be, yes, an oatmeal box…or a traffic cone…or the human mouth…) contains a piece of film that records the projected image over periods of time that can range from a second to a year.

Pinhole Resource Inc., a nonprofit organization dedicated to pinhole photography across the globe, was formed in New Mexico in 1984 by Eric Renner. He began working in pinhole photography in 1968, while teaching three-dimensional design for the State University of New York at Alfred. Images from his 6 pinhole panoramic camera were shown in the first exhibition of the Visual Studies Workshop Gallery in Rochester, New York. Consequently, one of Renner’s images was included in the Time-Life Series The Art of Photography, 1971. Through exhibitions and workshops, he met pinhole artists throughout the world and worried that their work might become as lost as the thousands of images taken during the Pictorial Movement from the late 1880s to early 1900s.

After forming the nonprofit, he created the Pinhole Journal, and in 1989 was joined by Nancy Spencer, co-director of Pinhole Resource and co-editor of the journal, which ceased publication in 2006. Their collections included images from Europe, the Mideast, Asia and the Americas, books about pinhole photography, and dozens of pinhole cameras, one of which dates back to the 1880s.

The Palace of the Governors Photo Archives contains more than 800,000 prints, cased photographs, glass plate negatives, stereographs, photo postcards, lantern slides and more. Almost 20,000 images can be keyword searched on its website. The materials date from approximately 1850 to the present and cover the history and people of New Mexico from some of the most important 19^th- and 20^th-century photographers of the West—Adolph Bandelier, George C. Bennett, John Candelario, W.H. Cobb, Edward S. Curtis, Charles Lindbergh, Jesse Nusbaum, T. Harmon Parkhurst, Ben Wittick, and many others.

The Archives actively seeks material from contemporary photographers as well in order to document the past 50 years of visual history in New Mexico. Recent acquisitions include works by Jack Parsons, Herbert A. Lotz, Tony O’Brien, Steve Fitch, David Michael Kennedy, John Willis, Ann Bromberg, and Cary Herz.

Image: Top, "Community," by Linda Pearson, 2002. Palace of the Governors Photo Archives HP.2012.15.357.

Media contact: Kate Nelson, Public Relations and Marketing

New Mexico History Museum/Palace of the Governors

(505) 476-1141; (505) 554-5722 (cell)

kate.nelson@state.nm.us

http://media.museumofnewmexico.org/

The New Mexico History Museum is the newest addition to a campus that includes the Palace of the Governors, the oldest continuously occupied public building in the United States; Fray Angélico Chávez History Library; Palace of the Governors Photo Archives; the Press at the Palace of the Governors; and the Native American Artisans Program. Located at 113 Lincoln Ave., in Santa Fe, NM, it is a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs.



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

Via National Press Photographers Association June 8, 2012

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


Via SaveTheNews.org

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

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


Setting the Record Straight on NYPD Journalist Arrests


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

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

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

Tahrir Square in 17 Months

Hundreds of thousands (photo taken after many left) gathered in Tahrir on June 2nd, in objection to the verdict in Mubarak trial. Mubarak and Habib El-Adly (ex-Interior minister) were sentenced to life imprisonment regarding the killing of protesters during the eighteen day. Gamal and Alaa Mubarak along with Adly's assistants were acquitted, and their verdict can't be appealed.© Jonathan Rashad

Jonathan Rashad is a Cairo-based photojournalist covering the Egyptian Uprising. He was in Egyptian custody for 54 days for covering clashes near Interior Ministry.

Here he posts gallery of aerial photos of Tahrir Square taken over 17 months

EDDIE ADAMS DAY: June 9, 2012

Via National Presss Photographers Association

NEW KENSINGTON, PA  - The Pennsylvania hometown of the great photojournalist Eddie Adams has proclaimed June 9, 2012, to be "Eddie Adams Day." The celebration in New Kensington includes includes a gallery opening, a screening of the documentary "An Unlikely Weapon," and a gala dinner with speaker and Pulitzer Prize winner John Filo.