Tag Archives: photohistory

On Portraiture by Teju Cole

There’s Less to Portraits Than Meets the Eye, and More

By Teju Cole

Portraiture existed long before photography was invented. And for more than a dozen years after photography’s invention, it was practically impossible to make a photographic portrait: the required exposure times were too long. But the two eventually came together, and now their pairing seems so natural that it’s as though photography was invented for making portraits…. read more

Carte de visite of Sojourner Truth, around 1864.CreditFrom the American Antiquarian Society

Lori Nix + Kathleen Gerber

The Photographer Who Captures Tiny Post-Apocalyptic Worlds

From Petapixel on the work of Lori Nix + Kathleen Gerber (Nix+Gerber).

“Since 2005, Nix has been working on an project titled “The City,” which shows various scenes from a post-apocalyptic world... Pretty much everything in each scene is created by the two artists, and each scene takes about 7 months to create and shoot, from start to finish.”

Excerpts from their project The City

The Drawing Room created a 8-minute mini-documentary about the work of photographer Lori Nix and Kathleen Gerber, a duo now known as Nix+Gerber.

Lori Nix website

Frederick Douglass’s Faith in Photography

Frederick Douglass’s Faith in Photography
How the former slave and abolitionist became the most photographed man in America.
By Matthew Pratt Guterl, New Republic

“New, cheaper techniques of reproduction, Douglass believed, allowed for a truer, more precise impression of the person on display. They also made it possible for the subject of the photograph to determine, to some extent, how people read and understood the image. Frame by frame, the authors of the volume show how carefully Douglass tried—in an age where, for so many people of color, this was simply unimaginable—to control meaning.” [read complete article]

Readings on Future of Photography

SOME GOOD READS

.
In the future, there will be no such thing as a “straight photograph”

The Next Revolution in Photography Is Coming
TIME Lightbox
by Stephen Mayes

.
The Case for Never Banning a Photograph By Jordan G. Teicher

What is 21st Century Photography by Daniel Rubinstein

Meet the Artists who play with the rules of Documentary Photography by 

Photogrammar

Photogrammar
Photogrammar is a web-based platform for organizing, searching, and visualizing the 170,000 photographs from 1935 to 1945 created by the United State’s Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI).

Tree Map Visualization of 1942 Classification System

story about the project on NPR

More information on the project

Dorothea Lange Documentary

Dorothea Lange ~ Watch Full Film: Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning
American Masters | PBS.

Dorothea Lange by Paul S. Taylor, 1934American Masters — Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning  explores the life, passions and uncompromising vision of the influential photographer, whose enduring images document five turbulent decades of American history, including the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl and World War II Japanese internment camps. Peabody- and five-time Emmy award-winning cinematographer Dyanna Taylor — the granddaughter of Lange and writer/social scientist Paul Schuster Taylor — directs and narrates this intimate American Masters documentary.

more info and links to Dorothea Lange resouces

Garry Winogrand

The first major Garry Winogrand retrospective since 1988 is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art until Sept. 21

Born in the Bronx, Winogrand did much of his best-known work in Manhattan during the 1950s and 1960s, and in both the content and dynamic style he became one of the principal voices of the eruptive postwar decades. Known primarily as a street photographer, Winogrand, who is often associated with famed contemporaries Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander, photographed with dazzling energy and incessant appetite, exposing some 26,000 rolls of film in his short lifetime. He photographed business moguls, everyday women on the street, famous actors and athletes, hippies, politicians, soldiers, animals in zoos, rodeos, car culture, airports, and antiwar demonstrators and the construction workers who beat them bloody in view of the unmoved police. Daily life in America—rich with new possibilities and yet equally anxiety-ridden and threatening to spin out of control—seemed to unfold for him in a continuous stream.

READINGS

Racism as Style: The Return of Blackface

Important read in BagNews Notes:
Racism as Style: The Return of Blackface — BagNews

by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa
(adapted from the Tumblr blog, The Great Leap Sideways)

Excerpt from essay > “On Tuesday of this week, the British creative arts website It’s Nice That published a feature on a photo-shoot by French multi-disciplinary studio Akatre entitled Tropical. The images consist of two young naked women painted entirely (and unrecognizably) black, stood in front of a brightly patterned tropically-themed seamless backdrop, or reflected in the smooth dark mirrored surface of a black table…” [ read more ]

—-

Happy to learn about thegreatleapsideways.com and greatleapsideways.tumblr.com, Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, editor. The sites showcase contemporary photography with small and extended surveys of work by contemporary photographers alongside extended interviews, features, videos and extracts from texts that illuminate the practise of photography and its wider context. Looks like a great resource.