East Cooper Medical Center conducts photo shoot of babies born around Father’s Day
Marlborough Welding Students Design Sculpture For Local Business
Diane and Kenny Cyphers, the owners of Empire Pest Control, reached out to the school’s Metal Fabrication and Welding program to see if some students could replace their rotting wooden bug sculpture with a brand new sculpture.
Photographer Shows the Raw, Unflinching Reality of Life on Skid Row
For the past decade, photographer Suitcase Joe has been spending time at Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles. This area, known for its population of people experiencing homelessness, often gets a bad rap. Suitcase Joe was curious to connect with its inhabitants and learn more about their stories. And from this desire, he forged relationships that have allowed him to capture Skid Row in a raw, honest manner.
His unflinching look at life on the street is also tinged with the respect he has for the people that he meets. By approaching them with a genuine spirit, he’s found himself enriched by these encounters. It’s this enrichment that he hopes to pass on to others by publishing his work together with short texts to explain the meaning behind the images. Soon, he’ll be releasing his second book Grey Flowers with Burn Barrel Press, which will feature many of his Skid Row images.
We had the opportunity to speak with Suitcase Joe about his photography. Read on for My Modern Met’s exclusive interview and learn more about what pushed him to visit Skid Row, as well as why he feels that he’s been able to get its residents to open up to him on camera.
Where does your love of photography stem from?
It’s hard to say exactly where my love for taking photos comes from. I read more than I look at other people’s photography, and often it’s the feeling from the people and places I’ve read about that I’m trying to capture. I want my photos to make people feel the way books and authors have made me feel.
For me, photography is much more than taking photos. I love to be alone, to wander and explore. I like meeting all kinds of people and talking with them to learn about their stories and life. My camera and writing give me a reason to do all this. It really brings me the deepest kind of joy—a small quiet one that I take everywhere I go.
What first pushed you toward documentary photography?
It all happened organically for me. I thought someone should photograph and document Skid Row for historical archives. I suggested the idea to a couple of photographers, who told me they had no interest in going into Skid Row. Eventually, I realized I was seeing it a certain way in my head, and I should just pick up a camera and do it myself.
I never set out to be any one kind of photographer, but my wanting people to connect with the unhoused is what pushed me toward documentary photography. At first, I just wanted to photograph all the people living in Skid Row. I thought about what the photos would look like to someone seeing them a hundred years after I took them. Soon I realized my photos alone were not enough to tell their stories.
Next, I began writing about our conversations and what I learned from them. That really changed everything for me. It combined writing, photography, adventure, and helping people all in one. I’ve continued to grow in the documentary direction ever since, but I approach my photos like fine art. I want to show the beauty of people and places. I’m most interested in showing the beauty of overlooked places or misunderstood people.
What was your first experience taking images at Skid Row like?
I was scared to go into Skid Row early on. I continually had to push myself past my comfort zone and go a little further each time. The first experience I can remember is talking with a man who went by the name Old Red. We hung out at his tent for a few hours while he fried chicken and talked. His intelligence was on another level. I remember thinking to myself, “Why am I surprised this man’s intellect is far beyond my own?”
I came to the realization that I was not as open-minded as I thought I was. I made the assumption that Old Red, like many others living outside, was not as intelligent because of where they were at in life. I know now that there are countless reasons why anyone can end up living on the streets, but that was a profound moment for me. I knew then that I had a lot to learn. I needed to be aware of my own misconceptions and shortcomings if I was gonna help change them for others. We all have room to grow.
Why do you think you are able to put people at ease in order to get the photograph that you’re after?
I get asked this a lot, and the only thing I can surmise is I’m genuine. I really care about the people I meet. I truly am interested in getting to know them. The connections I make are real. I don’t always take my camera along. I champion the underdog because I grew up as one. I greatly appreciate the time they take to speak with me and the many who have opened up about themselves to share with me. I really love them all.
What’s the biggest misconception you feel that the public has about people living on Skid Row?
Where do I begin? The truth is no matter where you’re at in life, we all want the same things—to be loved and appreciated and to be treated with dignity and respect. People living on the street are highly aware that people look down upon them like they are subhuman. This prevents a lot of them from ever trying to escape their surroundings because there is comfort in surrounding yourself with others who understand where you’re at without judgment.
The biggest misconceptions are that people living on the street want to be there or that they are there because they’re lazy or drug addicts. Each of them is a product of different environments, and no easy road ever leads to Skid Row. Don’t assume anything. Go say hello and find out.
What’s your most memorable encounter and why?
I’m not really a nostalgic person, and I don’t do too much looking back. Nothing stands out specifically. I look at my time there as a whole. Skid Row has deeply changed me as a person for the better. As many people as I’ve helped in Skid Row, they have also helped me. It was years before I realized Skid Row was my own kind of therapy. All the wonderful people there made me fall in love with humanity again.
What do you hope that the public takes away from these images?
Love and compassion for others even when it’s difficult and doesn’t always make sense. We don’t always have to understand everyone around us—but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be kind.
Suitcase Joe: Instagram
My Modern Met granted permission to feature photos by Suitcase Joe.
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Lisl Steiner, Colorful Creator of Black-and-White Photographs, Dies at 95
A flamboyant photojournalist with the moxie to stand up to autocrats, she captured the intimate moments of leading figures of the 20th century.
Lisl Steiner, a flamboyant photojournalist who was celebrated for her intimate, emotive images of history-tilting figures like Fidel Castro, John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as well as luminaries of music, stage and sports, died on June 7 in Mount Kisco, N.Y. She was 95.
Her death, at a hospital, was confirmed by her friends Ingrid Rockefeller and Vivian Winther, who had been collaborating with her on a documentary about her life.
Shooting for publications including Newsweek, Time, Life and National Geographic, Ms. Steiner was known for her flamboyant attire, her trademark explosion of fiery red hair, her sassy personality and her uncanny knack for connecting with her subjects, whom she jokingly referred to as “victims.”
“She had the ability to upend her subjects with surprising questions and her electric presence,” Ms. Rockefeller said in a phone interview. “She almost insinuated herself into the photograph by drawing a laugh or a glimpse of kindness in the eyes of her subject.”
Or shock. In a memorable 1957 shot taken backstage at the Teatro Colón, the main opera house in Buenos Aires, she captured a look of surprise on the face of a shirtless Louis Armstrong. As Ms. Steiner often recalled in later years, Ms. Rockefeller said, the photo was taken moments after the jazz great had made a pass at her and she had playfully shot him down.
She carried herself not only as an intimate of her subjects, but also as an equal, no matter how monumental in stature — or how notorious — that subject was. She produced many enduring shots of strongmen like Castro, the Cuban president; Gen. Augusto Pinochet of Chile; and the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.
“Photographing dictators was always my strength,” Ms. Steiner said in a 2006 interview with The New York Times. “I told them what to do — stand up, turn left — and they listened.”
By capturing so many luminaries of the 20th century in unguarded moments backstage, in hotel rooms, in limousines or on city streets, Ms. Steiner produced photographs that transcended deadline photojournalism and rose to the level of fine portraiture, Lawrence Schiller, a photojournalist friend, said.
One such shot, from 1973, depicted the lauded blues musician B.B. King lounging in the bed of a Philadelphia hotel wearing disheveled pajamas, looking weary but at ease, with a pipe in hand. Another showed Nat King Cole, the “Unforgettable” crooner, looking bored at a public barbecue, seemingly too crowd weary to bother whisking away the flies that had landed on his shoulder and forehead.
Sometimes even Ms. Steiner’s mistakes produced memorable images. Covering a visit to Argentina by Castro in 1959, she mistakenly loaded an exposed roll of film into her Leica camera, resulting in a haunting double-exposure shot of the Cuban leader dining in a grand home in Buenos Aires, superimposed with the eager faces of the assembled crowd outside.
But Ms. Steiner did not confine her lens work to the corridors of power, or the backstages of fame. In 1959, she began a long-running series called “Children of the Americas,” which chronicled quotidian but telling moments in the lives young people from a variety of social strata in North and South America.
One shot depicted a naked Paraguayan child from behind, padding around on a sea of straw hats. Another depicted shoeshine boys from Rio de Janeiro hustling for business on the sands of Copacabana.
She did none of it quietly. On a 1995 visit to her home in Pound Ridge, N.Y., in Westchester County, where she had lived with her husband, Michael Monchek, a psychiatrist, until his death in 1992, a New York Times reporter noted the orange Pontiac Firebird muscle car parked outside, with a champagne cork stuck on its antenna.
It was a fittingly ostentatious ride for a woman who appeared that day in bright orange attire, her arms nearly sagging under the weight of chunky bracelets, rings on every finger.
Wherever she went, she made a statement. “I’ve never encountered anyone like her,” a friend, Samantha Hunt, said in a phone interview. “She lived her life exactly as she wanted to. She would buy lizards at the pet store and liberate them in her home. One time my dog ran away to her house. She called and said: ‘I’ve been feeding him bonbons and belly dancing for him, but he’s getting bored, so I think you should come over and get him.’”
Elise Steiner (“Lisl” was a family nickname that stuck) was born on Nov. 19, 1927, in Vienna, the only child of Arnold and Katrina Steiner. Her father was a sports physical therapist and soccer referee.
Her mother was Jewish, and the family fled to Buenos Aires after Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, escaping the concentration camps that claimed many members of her mother’s family.
She studied art at the University of Buenos Aires and spent her early adult years working as an assistant on dozens of documentary films. She also had an active art career, producing pen-and-ink drawings of famous musicians who appeared at the Teatro Colón. She had full access at the opera house because her first husband, Hermann Erhardt, an oboist to whom she was married from 1950 to 1953, was the son of the theater’s director.
A boyfriend gave Ms. Steiner her first camera in 1955. Within a year, Time magazine had published photos she took of Pedro Eugenio Aramburu, the Argentine general who had recently seized power in a military coup, on a fishing excursion on the country’s southern coast.
Her career continued to expand and flourish after she moved to New York City in 1960. She settled in Greenwich Village.
By the 2000s, Ms. Steiner found her work the subject of career retrospectives at the Leica Gallery in New York, the PhotoAlicante art festival in Spain and elsewhere.
Ms. Steiner leaves no immediate survivors.
In her later years, she had returned to drawing, sketching musicians like the cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the singer Andrea Marcovicci. Discussing this return to an early passion with The Times in 1995, she slipped off one of her bracelets and held it up.
“My life is now a series of full circles,” she said, “like this bracelet. See, it has no end, always a new beginning, continuous.”
World’s Largest Bull Sculpture: world record in Audubon, Iowa
Audubon, Iowa, United States–Albert the Bull, the giant Bull sculpture in Audubon, Iowa, is a replica of a Hereford bull; made of a steel work frame (salvaged from abandoned Iowa windmills) covered in solid concrete and painted to resemble the animal; at 45 tons and 30 feet tall and 33 feet long with a 15-foot span, he’s nine times larger the his real-life doppelgänger and sets the world record for the World’s Largest Bull Sculpture, according to the WORLD RECORD ACADEMY.
Rediscovering Paul McCartney’s photos of The Beatles’ 1964 invasion
Paul McCartney used his Pentax camera the same way he used his guitar: with total freedom. And in early 1964, the 21-year-old took his new camera on perhaps the most momentous musical journey of the 20th century: The Beatles’ invasion of America.
Paul McCartney
Hundreds of photographs from that trip were recently rediscovered in McCartney’s archive: “It was really nice,” he said, “because I thought they were lost.”
The images, collected in the new book, “1964: Eyes of the Storm,” will be on view later this month at the National Portrait Gallery in London.
He offered a tour of the exhibit to correspondent Anthony Mason.
McCartney explained his process: “Taking photographs, I’d be just looking for a shot. And so, I’d aim the camera and just sort of see where I liked it, you know, oh, that’s it. And invariably, you pretty much take one picture.
“We were moving fast. So, you just learned to take pictures quickly.”
CBS News
One picture was taken as the group arrived at the Deauville Hotel in Miami. Mason said, “I think your quote in the book was, ‘I can almost hear her scream.'”
“Yeah, you can!” McCartney laughed. “The cop is going to restrain her, you know?”
Paul McCartney
“I also love the cop in the foreground who just sort of looks puzzled by everything,” said Mason.
“I like the architecture of that hotel,” said McCartney. “But, you know, as we were saying before, that had to be taken really quickly, just to snap that.”
“But, you have to have an eye to take that.”
“It’s my left one!”
The Beatles had started their trip in Paris. “And it was in Paris that we got the telegram, ‘Congratulations, boys, number one in the U.S. charts.'”
“And you’d said you won’t go to America unless you have a number one?”
“I know. And that was pretty spunky to kind of think that. But I’d seen quite a few of our major stars go to the States, and we’re going, ‘Wow, he’s going to leave us now. He’ll be made famous over there.’ But then they’d come back and they weren’t famous. So I said, ‘Well, if we go over there, you know, I really don’t want to come back with our tail between our legs.'”
Paul McCartney
In America they played “The Ed Sullivan Show.” Seventy-three million people would tune in. It was, McCartney writes, “the moment all hell breaks loose.”
Mason said, “To look at those pictures, it’s kind of you looking at the world, looking at you. You seemed very comfortable with it.”
“Yeah. I mean, you know, you got to think about it: We’re kids from Liverpool. And we’re trying to get famous, and it’s not easy. And we were like stars in America, and people loved us. So, we loved it. And having that number one was really the secret – because, if the journalists, you know, New York journalists, ‘Hey, Beatle! Hey, Beatle! Why you are here?’ whatever. We say, ‘We’re number one in your country!’ Bingo!”
Paul McCartney
McCartney captured the commotion on the streets around New York’s Plaza Hotel, and the crowd that chased them when they snuck out the side door.
Mason said, “There was one reporter who said you were like prisoners with room service?”
“Yeah,” McCartney laughed. “That was kind of true. But we liked room service. You know, we’d never had it before!”
From New York, The Beatles travelled by train to Washington, D.C. McCartney’s camera took the ride, too.
Paul McCartney
So many of McCartney’s pictures were taken on the move, including shots from his car of a policeman in Miami who’d pulled up next to him: “And that was basically what I saw. And we’d never seen policemen with guns. We just didn’t have that in England.”
Paul McCartney
But in Miami, McCartney broke out the color film. “For us, it was like going on holiday,” he said.
The Fab Four even had a few days off.
Mason said, “There are some great shots of you with, like, it looked like terry-cloth jackets.”
“Yeah, the hotel supplied them,” McCartney said. “You normally, like, get a robe, but this place, because it was Miami, had these little cool, little short things – and hats! We lived in them for days. Even Brian [Epstein], our manager. We thought they were really cool items of clothing.”
Paul McCartney
He caught George relaxing with an anonymous admirer: “In that picture, yeah, I don’t think I was trying to protect her identity,” McCartney said. “I love her bathing costume. So great. And, you know, there is George, like I keep saying, living the life. He’s got a drink which is probably a scotch and Coke. He’s got a tan, the girl in the yellow bikini. For lads from Liverpool, that was exceptionally wonderful!”
Paul McCartney
The band went back home to England in late February. By early April, The Beatles had the top five songs on the U.S. charts. McCartney writes, “We spent the months and years after holding on for dear life.”
Liveright
Mason asked, “Did you remember all these when you saw them?”
“Kind of,” McCartney replied. “It was a very memorable period, you know?”
“But there was so much going on, I’m amazed you could process it and keep it all.”
“Yeah, so am I!”
McCartney’s not only looking back at photos of his past; he announced last week to the BBC that this fall he’ll be releasing what he says is “the last Beatles record” – a John Lennon demo tape that McCartney is re-mixing using the latest artificial intelligence technology. The music, like Paul McCartney’s pictures, all part of The Beatles’ enduring legacy.
McCartney said, “For me, it is like a little slice of American history. And it’s my history, is that it’s Beatles history. So, it was great to rediscover these pictures.”
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Story produced by Ed Forgotson. Editor: Joseph Frandino.
Lincoln Arts Festival celebrates its 22nd year
LINCOLN, Neb. (KOLN) – This weekend marks the 22nd year of the Lincoln Arts Festival. Every year it consists of emerging artists as well as established ones.
This is the second year Hannah Demma has been showcasing her art at the festival. Last year, she was a part of the Emerging Artist Program that the Lincoln Art Council offers to people new to the creative world, or new to selling their work.
She now has her own business that focuses on her handmade paper, collages and paintings.
“An event like this is a really good opportunity for me to show my art to a new audience and talk about my art, good practice, teaching people about paper making and the possibilities of it is really exciting to me,” Demma said.
Demma said art is her life, and she’s been interested in it since she was very young.
“Whenever I’m not at work, I’m making art, I work with artists as a profession, Demma said. “It’s my recreation, career, it’s everything.”
Attendees could also stop by at ‘Creative Zones’ to see art work in real time and try their hand at crafts. Live music started later in the day on Saturday as well as ‘Culinary Courts’ where people could indulge in the art of food.
“It’s a very multi-sensory experience at the festival, it’s not just about the art, it’s about the entire, just emerging yourself into our arts and cultural community here,” Quinn Hullett, communications and marketing manager at the Lincoln Arts Council said.
The art festival will start at 10 a.m. on Sunday for its final day.
Copyright 2023 KOLN. All rights reserved.
What Kind of Photographer Should You Be?
When you become a professional photographers, you can take one of two general paths: a specialist with a focused approach to a single genre and/or style, or a jack of all trades who can competently tackle a wide variety of jobs, if not quite at the level of a specialist in each area. So, which is right for you? This helpful video essay features an experienced commercial photographer discussing the pros and cons of both approaches to help you decide.
Coming to you from Scott Choucino with Tin House Studio, this great video essay discusses the pros and cons of being a specialist or generalist as a professional photographer. Of course, the appeal of being a generalist is that you will at least be considered for many more jobs, and if you are someone who gets bored easily, you get the benefit of switching up your work quite a bit. On the other hand, a specialist, by virtue of their approach, is more likely to distinguish themselves from their peers simply because their singular focus allows them to really hone and push their craft to a very high level. Furthermore, some creatives enjoy that pursuit of narrow perfection more than being very good at a lot of things. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Choucino.
Mermaid pitstop and Paris dive – the weekend’s best photos
London, England
The secretary for levelling up, housing and communities, Michael Gove, speaks to the media outside Broadcasting House after appearing on BBC One’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme
Photograph: Lucy North/PA
Native artists say they are happy to share their culture
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Timothy Tate Nevaquaya loves sharing his Comanche art and music with non-Natives, but he wishes such cultural interaction could have happened much sooner.
Centuries earlier, in fact.
“Had the foreign invaders tried to understand our ways, things could have been so much better,” Nevaquaya said Tuesday during the 35th annual Sovereignty Symposium.
“They did not know what they were suppressing. They were cutting themselves off from something that had a very powerful meaning, a spiritual meaning,” Nevaquaya said.
“Thank God it has changed for the better.”
Nevaquaya served as a workshop panelist during the symposium, which is held every year in Oklahoma City as a forum for the exchange of ideas in a scholarly, non-adversarial environment. Speakers include tribal leaders and statewide elected officials, and workshops often focus on the contributions of tribes and tribal citizens to the economic and cultural development of the state.
Nevaquaya is an artist and flautist who divides his time between Tulsa and Apache and performs on the wooden flute during life events such as weddings, birthdays and memorial services. About 20 years ago, a non-Native friend asked him to take his flute to the hospital in Lawton so the friend could hear his music in his final hours. The family also invited him to play during the funeral.
‘Helps to heal the soul’
Native flute music, he said, “really helps to heal the soul. The non-Natives have really taken to it. It’s really a very beautiful thing that’s taking place now.”
Nevaquaya said Friday that if given more time as a panelist, he would have shared more of his personal thoughts about the power of culture to bring people together.
“Man has cheated himself out of some great opportunities,” he said. “Every race on this earth had gifts that were beneficial for everyone. We all have the same Creator.”
Mankind fails to live in peace when the acquisition of land and possessions takes center stage, Nevaquaya said.
“Our personal desires are uncontrolled, and that’s when dominance begins to take place,” he said.
“When the foreigners came, they were struck by the beauty of the land, and the obstacle was the people who were already here. They did not take time to understand them. Had they just stopped for a moment, they could have learned what they had: the medicine, the culture, the arts.”
After the workshop, Nevaquaya led a flute circle, inviting symposium participants to share their flute music and anything they had on their minds. His youngest brother, Calvert Nevaquaya, who lives in Norman, drew enthusiastic applause after playing a song that imitated bird sounds on a small, high-pitched flute.
Timothy and Calvert and their three brothers learned how to make flutes from their father, Doc Tate Nevaquaya, who was instrumental in the revival of Native flute music starting in 1969.
The crafting was taught to him, Calvert Nevaquaya said, but his songs are his own compositions.
‘In awe of his music’
“When I was growing up, I would take one of my dad’s flutes and go off and hide,” Calvert Nevaquaya said. “I heard Comanche hymn songs or powwow songs growing up. And we lived down the road from the Apache and we would hear them sing. I began to mimic the songs with my flute.
“And I grew up hearing my father’s songs and was in awe of his music. I believe my dad played the most traditional music you will ever hear.”
Calvert Nevaquaya said he had not previously participated in a flute circle.
“To me that was something new, and it almost felt like a therapy session for some people,” he said. “The instrument brings out people’s emotions. It brings a certain kind of peace.”
Calvert Nevaquaya is fully immersed in the culture as an acrylic painter, sculptor, musician and powwow dancer. He said about half the people who buy his art are non-Native.
“For me to sell my work to other races, to me it’s an honor, that they want to hang it in their homes,” he said.
Several years ago, Tate Nevaquaya was invited by the Comanche Nation to teach flute-making to a men’s group.
“I wanted them to know that this was their inheritance, that it could be passed down to the next generation, and that this instrument would be good for your soul, to help you overcome certain difficulties during your lifetime,” he said.
Traditionally, only the men played the flute.
“The people were very strict,” Tate Nevaquaya said.
“They believed that if a woman played it, it would cause a bad omen to come upon the tribes. A lot has changed. A lot of non-Native women play the flute today. I have created instruments for them.”
His ancestors played flute music to women they liked as part of a courtship ritual, Tate Nevaquaya said, “so it was instrumental in the posterity of the tribe.”
Cleveland County residents have several options for enjoying Native art, Tate Nevaquaya said, including the Jacobson House Native Art Center and the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art in Norman. In Oklahoma City, good examples of Native art are at First Americans Museum, the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, the Red Earth Inc. Museum and Exhibit C, he said.
Both men sell their art through their Facebook accounts.
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