SANTA CLAUS COMES TONIGHT!

Bill Ray: Three Santa Clauses leaving Downtown IRT Subway, New York, 1958

Martha Holmes: Brother and sister on the phone talking to Santa Claus, New York, 1947

Martha Holmes: Dean of Santas giving a lecture at the Waldorf Astoria Santa Convention, New York, 1948

Steve Schapiro: Chicago, December, 2009


Follow Santa's journey tonight here, courtesy of Norad .


Ready For Christmas?

BEARING WITNESS

Wounded by a land mine, Joao Silva, a New York Times photographer, shot three frames before becoming too weak to hold the camera.


The New York Times
 
By Michael Kamber

Published: December 23, 2010

TWENTY-FIVE years ago, Joao Silva was a troubled high school dropout on the streets of Johannesburg. His future looked bleak until the day a friend took him along on a photo shoot. Joao fell in love with the camera.


He was drawn to battle. Within a remarkably short time, his photos of conflict were on the front pages of newspapers around the world. His camera became a prolific instrument, helping the public understand the wars of the last two decades.

His photographs from Iraq — where he was embedded with both the American troops and the insurgents fighting against them — created, in my opinion, an unequaled record of the war: a Marine pulling a bloody comrade through the mud to safety; an Iraqi mother wailing in anguish as her dead son lay nearby; an enraged militia member firing a machine gun from a window ledge at American soldiers; a car bomb victim engulfed in flames.

The danger was extraordinary. As his colleagues were killed and wounded over the years, Joao became the last working member of the fabled Bang-Bang Club to cover conflict. A tight-knit group of South African photographers who covered the township wars near the end of apartheid, they soon branched out into photographing other conflicts. Yet even with two young children, Joao persevered, making trip after trip to Iraq, Afghanistan and other war zones.

“I’ve always somehow managed to walk away unscathed,” Joao said. “I’ve been very, very lucky.”

Joao’s luck held until Oct. 23, when he stepped on a cheap plastic land mine outside Kandahar, Afghanistan. The blast ripped his legs off. Shrapnel tore through his abdomen, causing massive internal injuries. He is currently undergoing rehabilitation at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, where he will remain for the foreseeable future.

Talented, humble and generous, Joao was the rock for many photojournalists in the field. It would be no exaggeration to call him probably the best-loved and most respected photographer working today. So his wounding has created a crisis of confidence of sorts for many photojournalists.

Like Joao, I am a contract photographer for The New York Times and have covered conflict over the years. I have taken his place in Afghanistan. In the wake of Joao’s wounding, friends ask me why I keep returning to photograph men inflicting suffering upon one another. I have asked myself and my fellow photojournalists this same question over the years.

I grew up in the 1960s, learning of Vietnam by poring over black-and-white photos in Life magazine and The Portland Press Herald. The classic images of Eddie Adams, Nick Ut and Henri Huet brought home to me the politics and drama of the war, a sense of my country’s history unfolding on the page. Photojournalists gave us a visceral understanding of the link between foreign policy and the violence done to people’s lives.

And photojournalism helped create a culture of visual literacy that was instrumental in the activism of the 1960s. It is a culture that is slowly receding into a storm of visual, aural and written white noise: the weekly wait for Life is replaced by a stream of cellphone photos, blogs and Twitter feeds. And as papers close around America, front-line photojournalism is in decline.

Still, the frustrations of photojournalists today are outweighed by many rewards. We venture into remote corners of the world to watch incredible dramas. We are often the sole objective witnesses. We find that much history would happen in a vacuum, save for our cameras.

“I get a lot of messages from people saying that we show the world what they cannot go see firsthand,” Joao told me last year.

This is the reward and the magic of photojournalism.

I know that Joao Silva’s camera has not finished its work. Once Joao finds balance on his new legs, he will venture again to the corners of the world. He loves photography like few I have known. Photojournalism remains a profession that allows a dedicated, courageous high school dropout from Johannesburg to help record the history of our times.

READY FOR CHRISTMAS?

Mick Rock:  Truman Capote and Andy Warhol 1979

Related: "The Man Who Shot The Seventies"

CHRISTMAS WISHES

Verner Reed: Christmas Reflections, Boston, 1955

TAXI DRIVER: STEVE SCHAPIRO

Via La Lettre De La Photographie.com

All Photographs © Steve Schapiro

Steve Schapiro is an American photographer whose pictures have graced the covers of Vanity Fair, Time, Sports Illustrated, Life, Look, Paris Match, and People. In Hollywood he has worked on more than 200 motion pictures; his most famous film posters are for Midnight Cowboy, Taxi Driver, Parenthood, and The Godfather Part III.

Steve Schapiro was the special photographer on the set of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, capturing the film’s most intense and violent moments from behind the scenes. "Taxi Driver, Steve Schapiro" features hundreds of unseen images selected from Schapiro’s archives, painting a chilling portrait of a deranged gunman in the angry climate of the post-Vietnam era.


Links
http://www.taschen.com/


Related: Making Movies

NEW YORK AT NIGHT, DECEMBER 20, 1934

In our previous post, we wrote about the official beginning of the winter season. Nation Public Radio's "The Picture Show" reminded us of a truly iconic photograph, one that only could have been made on the shortest day of the year, on a fleeting moment when the city was slightly darkened, but the office lights remained on.


New York City At Night, 76 Years Ago

by Shannon Perich
© NPR



Between 4:30 and 5 p.m. on Dec. 20, 1934, Berenice Abbott's camera was hanging off an upper floor of the Empire State Building recording New York City at Night.

With a fixed artistic vision, the location scouted and exposure calculated for fifteen minutes, the independently-minded photographer captured that fleeting moment when the city was slightly darkened, but the office lights remained on.


For some, this photograph, though some 76 years old, may seem somewhat familiar with its dramatic angles, hovering perspective and workers still in their offices after dark. But for Abbott, it represented the emerging of the modern New York and new lifestyles that came with it.

Abbott was born in 1898 in Springfield, Ohio, and moved to New York in 1919. Frustrated by the commercialism and politics threatening her Greenwich Village bohemian lifestyle (like Prohibition), and intrigued by the artistic and literary of circles of Paris, she moved in 1921. Her eight years in Paris were pivotal in shaping her as a photographer.

She was versed in sculpture, drawing and writing, but it was during her employment in Man Ray's photography studio that she learned to make photographs. Ray (1890-1976) ran a famous portrait studio but in his spare time was at the vanguard of surrealist photography. He challenged the conventional approaches to photography, which provided Abbott with opportunities to become a successful portrait photographer in her own right. He also introduced her to Eugene Atget (1857-1927), a photographer noted for tirelessly documenting the architecture, urban views and landscapes of Paris.

The modernist tendency to see the city as a valid subject and as a scene for formal studies — and the appreciation for long-term documentary work — were both visible trends in Abbott's photography by the time she returned to America in Jan. 1929.

It might be difficult for our contemporary eyes and city experiences to allow us to imagine Abbott's New York City at Night as a new view of the world. In 1932, the Great Depression was still plaguing many Americans. And the Farm Security Administration was about to create a vision of America that remains seared into a shared visual history — with photos from the field like Migrant Mother.

But Abbott's cityscape offers a perspective of excitement about American technological achievements — through her ability to blend cubist visual constructions with the reality of urban modern architecture. The photograph also holds some of the romance and mystery of the night that Ella Fitzgerald sings about in Cole Porter's song, All Through The Night, from the musical Anything Goes.

This image, perhaps her most well-known, remains a visually exciting image with complex rhythms that might offer our jaded eyes a way to see the city with refreshed excitement.

Abbott's enthusiasm for documenting New York City resulted in an extraordinary documentary project that can be explored in her book Changing New York. Many of those photographs can be seen at the Museum of the City of New York, where Abbott left her archive.

The Smithsonian's Archive of Art also holds many documents related to the Federal Art Project that funded the massive photography project and Abbott’s assistant Elizabeth McCausland's papers. Abbott's legacy also continues through a photography award in her name that is given to emerging photographers with a body of work waiting to be published.

Shannon Thomas Perich is an associate curator of the Photographic History Collection at Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Her regular contributions to The Picture Show are pulled from the Smithsonian's archives. See the original NPR article here.

WINTER BEGINS

Alfred Eisenstaedt: Trees in snow, St. Moritz, 1947

In astronomy, the solstice is either of the two times a year when the Sun is at its greatest distance from the celestial equator, the great circle on the celestial sphere that is on the same plane as the earth's equator. In the Northern Hemisphere, this year the winter solstice occurs on Tuesday, December 21, at 6:38 p.m. EST. (This year is a rare celestial "Trifecta": the Winter Solstice, a full moon, and a total lunar eclipse.)


Already, wintry weather has made headlines around the world. Currently on exhibition at Monroe Gallery of Photography is "'Tis The Season", an imaginative survey of photographs with a winter theme or setting. Just in time for the holidays, the exhibition also includes several photographs depicting the celebrations of the season. As winter approaches in the northern hemisphere and the days grow short, this exhibition looks to the beauty of ice and snow.

Happy Winter!

Harold Roth: Sledding in Central Park, 1939

 

Verner Reed: Maine Morning, Pemaquid, ME, 1978

 

 

Ida Wyman: Wrought Iron in Snow, New York, 1947

 

 

 

View the exhibit here.

JOE McNALLY RECEPTION TONIGHT

Joe McNally: Rooftop Ballerina (Nadia Grachevo, Prima Ballerina), Bolshoi Ballet, Moscow, 1997



Please join us tonight, Friday December 17, from 5 - 7 as we welcome Joe McNally for a reception, book signing, and special exhibit. Joe will be signing copies of his new book, The LIFE Guide to Digital Photography: Everything You Need To Shoot Like The Pros.

Also on view, "'Tis The Season", photographs with a winter theme or setting. A perfect way to look at snow - inside!

Hope to see you!

American Express Gives $100,000 to Help Ellis Island Group

Stephen Wilkes: Corridor #9, Island 2, Ellis Island

Back in April, we wrote about an article by Robin Pogrebin in The New York Times reporting that "Save Ellis Island, a nonprofit charged with restoring that historic immigrant gateway to America, may not be able to save itself. The group has run out of money." There was an urgent appeal: Funds Sought to Continue Restoration at Ellis Island; abandoned buildings on the southern side of Ellis Island immortalized in Stephen Wilkes' photographs.

Today, The New York Times reports that "American Express Gives $100,000 to Help Ellis Island Group".

By Robin Pogrebin


On the brink of extinction last spring, the nonprofit organization charged with restoring Ellis Island will benefit from a $100,000 gift from American Express, the credit card company is to announce on Thursday.

"It’s an enormous boost,” said Judith R. McAlpin, the president of the organization, Save Ellis Island. “American Express has long been associated with the very best in historic preservation. It’s like the Good Housekeeping seal of approval.”

The donation, the company said, was prompted by an article in The New York Times about how Save Ellis Island was struggling to continue the restoration of 29 buildings on the 27.5 acre historic immigrant gateway to America. “We’re trying to help them help themselves so they’re able to raise more money not just for the restoration of the buildings — they need general operating support,” Timothy J. McClimon, president of the American Express Foundation, said. “People are in love with the buildings, they’re passionate about the buildings — that’s kind of the easy money. But how do you sustain yourself as an organization?”

What Save Ellis Island needs most, Mr. McClimon said, is to build its fund-raising capacity by strengthening its board and development staff. As a result, American Express will make its donation through the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which will provide expertise. The trust included Ellis Island on its list of America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places twice in the 1990s.

Mr. McClimon left open the possibility that American Express might contribute more in the future. “We’re very positive about Save Ellis Island,” he said. “We think they have great potential.”

See Stephen Wilkes' Ellis Island Collection here.

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71 YEARS AGO: GONE WITH THE WIND OPENS

On December 15, 1939, "Gone With The Wind" premiered in Atlanta, Georgia.

Gone With The Wind  is often considered the most beloved, enduring and popular film of all time. Sidney Howard's script was derived from Margaret Mitchell's first and only published, best-selling Civil War and Reconstruction Period novel of 1,037 pages that first appeared in 1936, but was mostly written in the late 1920s. Producer David O. Selznick had acquired the film rights to Mitchell's novel in July, 1936 for $50,000 - a record amount at the time to an unknown author for her first novel, causing some to label the film "Selznick's Folly." At the time of the film's release, the fictional book had surpassed 1.5 million copies sold. More records were set when the film was first aired on television in two parts in late 1976, and controversy arose when it was restored and released theatrically in 1998.

The famous film, shot in three-strip Technicolor, is cinema's greatest, star-studded, historical epic film of the Old South during wartime that boasts an immortal cast in a timeless, classic tale of a love-hate romance. The indomitable heroine, Scarlett O'Hara, struggles to find love during the chaotic Civil War years and afterwards, and ultimately must seek refuge for herself and her family back at the beloved plantation Tara. There, she takes charge, defends it against Union soldiers, carpetbaggers, and starvation itself. She finally marries her worldly admirer Rhett Butler, but her apathy toward him in their marriage dooms their battling relationship, and she again returns to Tara to find consolation - indomitable.

Authenticity is enhanced by the costuming, sets, and variations on Stephen Foster songs and other excerpts from Civil War martial airs. Its opening, only a few months after WWII began in Europe, helped American audiences to identify with the war story and its theme of survival.

With three years advance publicity and Hollywood myth-making, three and one-half hours running time (with one intermission), a gala premiere in Atlanta on December 15, 1939, highest-grossing film status (eventually reaching $200 million), and Max Steiner's sweeping musical score, the exquisitely-photographed, Technicolor film was a blockbuster in its own time. A budgeted investment of over $4 million in production costs was required - an enormous, record-breaking sum. The film (originally rough-cut at 6 hours in length) was challenging in its making, due to its controversial subject matter (including rape, drunkenness, moral dissipation and adultery) and its epic qualities, with more than 50 speaking roles and 2,400 extras


More from filmsite.org

Exhibits:

Making Movies
Hollywood, USA

Inquire about the Gone With The Wind Premiere photograph