Stephen Wilkes: Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, Day to Night, 2013
Wednesday, November 26, 2014
Monday, November 24, 2014
James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner posthumously receive Presidential Medal Of Freedom
Via Gothamist
Today, President Obama is presenting the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the county's highest civilian honor, to a number of people, like economist Robert Solow, actress Meryl Streep, musician Stevie Wonder, choreographer Alvin Ailey (in a posthumous honor) and composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim. But three people are not celebrities, notable scientists or politicians—they were three young men who were murdered while registering black voters during the "Freedom Summer" of 1964.
The White House press release noted that the medal is "presented to individuals who have made especially meritorious contributions to the security or national interests of the United States, to world peace, or to cultural or other significant public or private endeavors" and noted the honorees' work:
James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were civil rights activists and participants in “Freedom Summer,” an historic voter registration drive in 1964. As African Americans were systematically being blocked from voter rolls, Mr. Chaney, Mr. Goodman, and Mr. Schwerner joined hundreds of others working to register black voters in Mississippi. They were murdered at the outset of Freedom Summer. Their deaths shocked the nation and their efforts helped to inspire many of the landmark civil rights advancements that followed.Chaney, from Mississippi, and Goodman and Schwerner, of New York, were traveling in Philadelphia, Mississippi, to investigate the burning of a black church, when they were arrested for speeding. They were, the NY Times reports, "slain after their release from jail in what is believed to have been a Ku Klux Klan ambush. Their bodies were found 44 days later buried in an earthen dam." Their deaths are "widely seen as helping inspire the historic civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., in 1965, and the passage of the Voting Rights Act the same year."
The men who shot and buried the three were convicted of civil rights violations, but not murder. In 2005, Mississippi State Attorney General Jim Hood revisited the case and tried Edgar Ray Killen, considered the ringleader in the murders. Killen was ultimately convicted of manslaughter, but not murder. During Killen's trial, Goodman's mother read a postcard her son, an Upper West Sider who had been a student at Queens College, sent to her on June 21, 1964, the last day of his life, "Dear Mom and Dad, I have arrived safely in Meridian, Miss. This is a wonderful town, and the weather is fine. I wish you were here. The people in this city are wonderful, and our reception was very good. All my love, Andy."
Killen, 89, is serving a 60-year prison sentence.
Related: June 21, 1964: The Murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner
A four block stretch of the Upper West Side, west of the West End Avenue, was carved out in 1967 to created "Freedom Place," to pay tribute to Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner. A plaque pay tribute to their how the men gave "their lives in the unending struggle for freedom and democracy."
Sunday, November 23, 2014
Joe McNally - A Retrospective
Via Joe McNally's blog
Joe McNally Photojournalist Exhibition at the Monroe Gallery of Photography in Santa Fe, New Mexico, October 3 - November 23, 2014. See the video of a 30 year retrospective of Joe McNally's diverse and dynamic images. Joe reflects on the passage of time, and Sidney Monroe discusses collector's rising interest in photojournalism as a fine art. View the exhibition images here.
Saturday, November 22, 2014
Bob Gomel got closer than he wanted to JFK’s funeral
Via Houston Chronicle
EDITOR’S NOTE: Last year as the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy loomed, The Texican visited with noted photographer and Houston native Bob Gomel at his home in the Memorial area to talk about his career behind the lens. Gomel captured some of the most poignant images of the funeral of the slain president that the world would ever see. It was an especially sad assignment for Gomel, who once spent an afternoon with Kennedy watching football while he was on the campaign trail. With the 51st anniversary on Saturday, here’s a look back at that profile of Gomel, 81, who still keeps busy globetrotting with his trusty collection of cameras.
As a Life magazine photographer in the ’60s, Bob Gomel saw some of the most pivotal moments in pop culture history through the lens of his Nikon.
A hallway in his Memorial home is lined with crisp, perfectly matted and framed shots that he snapped of Muhammad Ali, Marilyn Monroe, The Beatles, Richard Nixon, and Dustin Hoffman. Each photo comes with a rich story from Gomel that leaves the listener with a perma-grin.
But it is Gomel’s most celebrated subject, President John F. Kennedy, that has brought him the most notoriety — and the most sadness. Capturing the funeral of a man he had grown personally close to was not in his plan.
There was an afternoon late in 1960 when then President-elect Kennedy, Gomel, and another photog spent a few rather normal hours together that he’ll always remember with great pride.
“Kennedy was working and living in a brownstone in Georgetown picking out his cabinet for his first term,” says Gomel, who was waiting to capture the first shots of newly appointed cabinet members. It was slow going some days. Men in suits would come in and out, with little or no word to the press.
“There was just two of us left outside on a cold, dreary Saturday afternoon, so Kennedy invited us inside to watch the Army-Navy football game,” he says. That other man was noted Washington news photog James Atherton, no slouch in his own right. Atherton passed away in 2011.
They went inside and TV trays were brought out. Kennedy, Gomel, Atherton, and some Kennedy staffers ate steak and baked potatoes and watched the game.
“The next thing I remember is Jim waking me up, telling me that Navy won and that I fell asleep on the president,” Gomel says. From then on Kennedy would always have fun with him about it.
Gomel’s photographic journey began at 11 years old, when he delivered groceries on his bicycle for one hot summer in the Bronx, making just enough cash for a Circoflex camera. It cost him $88 — not a small chunk of change in 1944 — but what he wanted more than anything was a camera of his own that didn’t belong to his parents. He wanted to explore the world with a lens, even if it was just the Bronx.
After graduating from New York University, a hitch as a Navy pilot during the tail-end of the Korean War only made him yearn for a life behind the lens even more.
Gomel left Life at the end of 1969 and opened up his own studio in Manhattan. He did commercial work for the likes of Audi, Shell, Pan Am, Volkswagen, and Merrill Lynch before heading to Houston in the late ’70s to to take part in the oil boom.
Now 80 years old, the Manhattan-born, Bronx-raised and proud Houstonian of nearly 40 years hasn’t slowed down a bit, and neither has his trigger finger. When I spoke with him on a sunny afternoon this week, he was giddily telling me about one of his upcoming, month-long photography trips to South India.
“Houston was so exciting at that time, there was so much going on,” he says. “You could work 8 days a week here.”
The hubbub surrounding the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Kennedy means that there are new documentaries, news packages, and online and print stories to resurrect old feelings. Men like Gomel that were on the front lines of history aren’t so cynical about the situation.
“What’s troubling me is the cockamamie work of people trying to capitalize on the anniversary with their assassination theories,” says Gomel. “I have to concur with a preponderance of analysts that Oswald acted alone.”
He was in New York when he found out about the assassination in Dallas. He showed up to work at the Life offices to find that everyone who was on staff was ordered to leave immediately for Washington.
“There was no time to even pack a toothbrush,” he says.
He got into Washington, D.C., on the morning of Nov. 23, just in time to arrive at the White House to see the president’s body being brought back home. From then on, Gomel was shooting everything in front of him.
The mood that week still makes him shudder. The stun in everyone’s eyes, the disbelief and shock was surreal.
“We hadn’t experienced anything like that in our lifetime; it was a series of shocks. It was more than we could comprehend at one time,” he says.
Couriers picked up film every hour to fly it back to New York to get it developed. Sleep was a rarity.
Gomel’s shot of Kennedy’s casket lying in state in the U.S. Capitol rotunda as thousands upon thousands filed in to pay their respects is haunting in its simplicity and scope. The blue hue came from some intervention from the man upstairs, he says. He had been down on the main floor but decided to explore the potential of the balcony above. He found a door that had access and he went up there.
“It was just the right time of day to capture a little bit of light coming through.”
He would shoot from nearly the same vantage point for President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s funeral in March 1969, but from much higher in the rotunda.
The graveside services for Kennedy at Arlington National Cemetery on Nov. 25 featured dozens of heads of state from around the world. There was Charles de Gaulle, Haile Selassie I, Chancellor Ludwig Wilhelm Erhard, and Gomel, somehow right in the mix. He wasn’t exactly supposed to be that close to the world’s leaders.
“I learned only recently at a Life magazine reunion that we didn’t even have credentials for Arlington National Cemetery,” he laughs.
The Life staff had rented a limousine for the funeral and were accidentally put into the official motorcade with all the heads of state.
“I had a front row seat,” Gomel says. His photo, with de Gaulle solemnly saluting the casket of Kennedy and the others looking on in reverence, shows just how packed Kennedy’s service was. He estimates there are 60-plus dignitaries in the photo. Somewhere there is a list of everyone shown.
Getting the best shots sometimes had to come by hook or by crook, on boss’s orders.
“We had to find a way to get pictures. We had an admonition from our editor to not come back with just excuses,” he says.
During the viewing and funeral, Gomel found himself putting aside his personal relationship with Kennedy for work. He was 100 percent concerned with reporting it and capturing all the details with his camera.
“I had to disconnect from my association with the president and the fact he knew my name,” he says.
Gomel was in Houston with the president when he made his famous Moon Race speech at Rice University in September 1962. You can spy the photog in the background of a picture of Kennedy here in town, too.
“We choose to go to the moon,” Kennedy said that day. “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
“I can remember it clearly today,” said Gomel. “He has his fist clenched on the podium, and his delivery was so dynamic. He made all of us believe this was possible and achievable.”
Gomel captured a candid shot of Kennedy climbing out of a space capsule at NASA, which he’s extremely proud of. It’s in his home gallery, and one of the first photos you see when you come into his house. It’s symbolic of the country finally making it to the moon, just as Kennedy wanted.
After the 50th anniversary specials and tributes die down after Nov. 22, Gomel will continue to reflect on what he was a part of all those years ago.
“I wish I didn’t have to have that experience. I have gotten a small degree of fame from it, but I wish it came from another source.”
This fall he’s been a busy man, recounting a week of his life 50 years ago, a week that he wishes he wouldn’t have played such a small, but every important role in.
Gomel was on a team of Life photographers tasked with capturing every step of Kennedy’s funeral in November 1963. Gomel was all of 30 years old, thrust into an American nightmare, and assigned to document it all for folks at home. The somber proceedings threw a dark shroud over the country, but Gomel had to keep snapping photos. The fact that the slain president actually knew his name after years of Life coverage made the situation all the more harder for Gomel, who had been orbiting around Kennedy since before he was even elected president.
Tuesday, November 18, 2014
Lucien Clergue (1934 - 2014)
The New York Times: Lucien Clergue, Master and Promoter of Art Photography, Dies at 80
The Guardian: Lucien Clergue obituary
The Guardian: Lucien Clergue obituary
l'Oeil de la Photographie: Lucien Clergue's funeral
The Telegraph: Lucien Clergue was a photographer known for his friendship with Picasso and his images of bullfighting and nudes
HyperAllergic: Remembering French Photographer Lucien Clergue, a Giant of the Field
ArtNet News: Photography Legend Lucien Clergue Dead at 80
artlyst: Lucien Clergue French Photographer And Life-Long Friend Of Picasso Has Died
SBS: French photographer and Picasso confidant Lucien Clergue dies aged 80
l’Oeil de la photographie: Lucien Clergue is dead (1934-2014)
Artforum: Lucien Clergue (1934–2014)
Friday, November 14, 2014
Review: Joe McNally at Monroe Gallery
photograph
November/December 2014
Review
By Douglas Fairfield
Monroe Gallery of Photography, Santa Fe
Joe McNaIIy, Yellowstone - Walkway in the Fog, 2006.
©Joe
McNaIIy. Courtesy Monroe Gallery
Being at the right place at the right time is a
photographer's modus operandi, and
photojournalist Joe McNally has had his share of right-place, right-time
moments; moments that have resulted in memorable, if not iconic images. In a
retrospective of the photographer's work - on view at Monroe Gallery of
Photography in Santa Fe through November 23 - more than 45 images stand
testament to McNaIIy's discerning eye, both in formal and candid situations.
Photos in color and black and white dating from 1978 to 2013 feature subjects
of a most eclectic nature not typically associated with one photographer. But
given a 30-year career in which McNaIly has contributed to TIME, Newsweek,
Fortune, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, and LIFE, among
others, it is little wonder that his portfolio runs the gamut in terms of
subject matter. This includes sports, politics, music, science, portraiture,
the natural and urban landscape, and war. lnterestingly, McNaIIy carries the
distinction of being the last staff photographer for LIFE, whose pages, over
the years, were filled with photographs by Alfred Eisenstaedt, John Loengard,
Carl Mydans, Gordon Parks, and W. Eugene Smith.
Among the pictures on display are eight life-size portraits
by McNaIly of individuals impacted by the events of 9/11 taken just days
following the horrific attack. lncluded are former mayor of New York City
Rudolph Giuliani and New York firefighter Joe Hodges, each part of McNally's
larger document called Faces of Ground Zero, which traveled around the country
and spawned a book by the same title. The one-of-kind, 80 x 40-inch Polaroid
photos are mounted on freestanding stanchions placed down the center of the
gallery. Whereas each picture by McNally holds a newsworthy narrative, a few
nudge into fine art, like Yellowstone— Walkway in the Fog, 2006, in which an
unoccupied walkway emerging from the bottom center of the composition curves
gently to the right leading the viewer into an otherworldly environment of
shimmering, copper-colored mineral water and fog-shrouded background. In the
upper left corner is a snow-covered rise where barely visible trees appear like
scratchings upon the photographic surface. History-making events and sheer
beauty are fully captured through McNally's lens.
Tuesday, November 11, 2014
John Doar, Federal Lawyer in Battle Against Segregation, Dies at 92
--Via The New York Times
John Doar, who was a leader in the federal government’s legal efforts to dismantle segregation in the South during the most volatile period of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and who returned to government service to lead the team that made the constitutional case for the possible impeachment of President Richard M. Nixon, died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 92.
He escorted James Meredith onto the campus of the University of Mississippi in 1962, even as then-Gov. Ross Barnett and angry crowds sought to keep the school segregated. Doar later was the lead prosecutor in the federal trial arising from the deaths of three civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner. Those killings inspired the 1988 film "Mississippi Burning."
Full obituary here.
Related: June 21, 1964: The Murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner
Tuesday, October 28, 2014
Joe McNally in Rwanda, 1997
I was in Rwanda after the genocide, which was very difficult. Not only was there the evidence and smell of death lingering in many places, but it was also distressing to see the tidal wave of human displacement, orphaned children, and people with literally no place to go. I shot this picture in panorama format, as I was trying to get across the enormous sweep of this very large refugee camp in the volcanic highland area of the Rwandan-Zairean border. (Zaire is now the Congo.)
What you don’t see in this picture is the crowd of some 300 to 400 people watching me shoot it. She was standing there, alone, and her simple, sweet, uncertain stance certainly made for a photograph. But I had an enormous crowd following me around, as visitors to a refugee camp often become that day’s movie. I crouched on the ground behind my tripod, shooting quickly, begging everyone to stay behind me. And, even though I was concentrating on making the picture, I became aware of the light touch of children’s fingers on my skin and hair. They were gently pinching and rubbing my skin, and pulling my hair. A white person was still strange to them and I believe they thought my coloration would somehow rub off and there would the more familiar black skin they were used to underneath. And my hair? Well that was really different, and the object of much interest. --Joe McNally
Saturday, October 18, 2014
Steve Schapiro Talks Photography, Bowie, And 21st Century Hippies
Steve Schapiro with “Bowie, The Man Who Fell to Earth” New Mexico, 1975. Archival pigment print. 40 x 50 inches. Photo by: Carrie McGath
Via Chicagoist
Steve Schapiro's photographs occupy and navigate a space that is deeply human and soulful, encouraging his subjects to feel able to open their own apertures and shred any facade. David Bowie, more often a series of personas than a man, is captured by Schapiro as rawly human, even vulnerable at times, even if he is in character. The works in Schapiro's exhibition, "Warhol, Reed, and Bowie" at the Ed Pashcke Art Center acts as an archive of this ability. Some of these images are iconic; Bowie Smoking a Cigarette once graced the cover of Rolling Stone.
Schapiro spoke with me on the phone recently about this show, his past work and future projects. He has a way about him that encourages, even insists on, making his subjects comfortable in front of his lens.
CHICAGOIST: So you discovered photography at summer camp at the age of 9? Was that your first time with a camera?
STEVE SCHAPIRO: I think it was first time and I guess it was probably a Brownie camera, and I took pictures at the camp. What really excited me is that we developed our own film and to see them come out of the water, out of the chemicals, and to see the clouds and all of that to me was very exciting and it started me in being interested in taking a lot of pictures. Henri Cartier-Bresson's The Decisive Moment came out and that was an incredible book at the time and it is amazing how he caught the peak of action and also had such great design and gave you a sense of where you were and really made me decide I really wanted to become a photographer.
C: What about the beginning of your professional career? How did all of that start?
STEVE SCHAPIRO: When I was growing up as a journalistic photographer, the thing you could most hope for was to become a Life magazine photographer. So I set my sights on that and I started doing projects on my own. I spent four weeks at a migrant workers camp in Arkansas and that was one of the projects I did on my own. I came back and there was a small Catholic magazine called, Jubilee, and they would give you six to eight pages to do a portfolio. So I got my first portfolio printed on the migrant workers and the The New York Times picked up one of the pictures and used it as the cover shot for their magazine section, and I gradually worked into Life magazine and did quite a bit for them and for other magazines.
C: You're a great observer of humanity, even with iconic, larger-then-life figures like Bowie. I am thinking specifically of the Bowie photograph from The Man Who Fell to Earth, one of the highlights of the show. This was printed at the last minute for this exhibit, correct? There is a somberness and vulnerability in this work while it is magical.
STEVE SCHAPIRO: It's an image that was never printed till about two weeks before the show. I looked at that transparency and realized it is a really good picture, and it was only when I thought we needed another Bowie picture to round out the exhibit that I went back and looked at the transparencies and I found this image. It had never been edited or printed. It is entirely untouched.
C: Can you talk about how you tap into the personality of your subjects?
STEVE SCHAPIRO: Basically, when I am photographing, I try to be very quiet. When I am with someone I don't want to have a conversation with them because then they would be talking to me and they're not really being themselves. Their thoughts are what they are saying to me and what I am saying to them. I just look for those moments when there is something in their eyes or an attitude, something that shows the spirit of that person.
C: Another favorite of mine is the one of Warhol holding that displeased dog. So much is captured in that image.
STEVE SCHAPIRO: With that picture of Warhol, the Velvet Underground had done a concert and the promoter wasn't paying them for three weeks and there was this place that looked a castle in the Hollywood Hills and the person who owned it let them camp there. I was just walking around with Andy and suddenly he saw this dog and picked it up, and that was the picture. It wasn't anything we spent any time on and it is a very warm picture and a different side of him.
C: Do you find when you are photographing a performer like Bowie, a quintessential performer and artist, I am thinking, like you were saying, he was very aware he was being photographed, but he also seemed to put his guard down for you. Can you talk about that?
STEVE SCHAPIRO: I think Bowie is very smart and I think he has a great sense of images and in coming up with new kinds of images. The first session I did with him started at four in the afternoon and ended at four the next morning when I did that picture of him on the motorcycle, and we used the headlights of a car to light it. He would constantly come up with new costumes and I would pick up my camera to photograph him and it would be an incredible outfit, but he would stop me and say, "Wait a minute, I need to fix something," and he would go to the dressing room and come back 20 minutes later in something totally different. Fortunately, there would be a lot of things he would try on, so we would get a lot of pictures. The picture of him smoking a cigarette was a cover of Rolling Stone and it has been used a lot, but it was originally the cover for Rolling Stone.
C: Photographing celebrities aside, could you talk about your work with the everyman: the series of the migrant workers you talked about and also the addicts you photographed in East Harlem. I am wondering what drew you to these subjects.
STEVE SCHAPIRO: They're both highly emotional subjects where there are problems involved, and from a human basis, they are interesting situations to cover. I have a book coming out next year about the hippie movement of today. I photographed Haight-Ashbury in 1967 and it was the center of the hippie movement. My son and I photographed between 2011 and 2012 a lot of music festivals and situations like that and we photographed the spirit of a whole new generation who are not as much into drugs but into meditation and are conscious of organic food and good eating. Today there are these music festivals and there are people who just go from one to another and it is, in a sense, their religion. I met this one man who said I am not a Catholic, not a Baptist, I am a festivaltarian. What he meant was that, spirituality, he got an inner sense of a spiritual high. The books is really about the joy people have.
C: Any other projects?
STEVE SCHAPIRO: I am doing a new book on Misericordia, started by Sister Rosemary, a Catholic nun, and it is a place that is now 35 acres in upper Chicago. It is really for people who have developmental difficulties and it is an amazing place just filled with joy. It is really a joyful place, and that's the book I am working on right now.
C: To close, do you photograph everyday?
STEVE SCHAPIRO: I try to, and particularly when I am working on a specific project, I try to maintain a continuity. The Barbara Steisand book comes out in November and I am working on a Civil Rights book, so at the same time I am shooting new stuff, I am also going through old stuff for these books.
Slideshow here.
Tuesday, October 14, 2014
Screening of the film Remembering Edward Weston
October
18, 2014
2:00
pmVia The New Mexico Museum of Art
Celebrating its rich collection of photographs and the key role the medium has played in shaping New Mexico history, culture, and tourism, the museum presents a series of exhibitions in the year-long series Focus on Photography (March 7, 2014 – April 19, 2015). In conjunction with these exhibitions, the museum will host gallery talks by photographers as well as a photography film series:
October 18: Remembering Edward Weston is filled with stories and memories of this much-loved and influential photographer. The film includes interviews with two of Weston’s sons, his former wife Charis Wilson, historian Beaumont Newhall, and many others. Curator of Photography Katherine Ware will introduce the film with a short slide presentation about Edward Weston in New Mexico.
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