‘From today painting is dead!’ was how French artist Paul Delaroche greeted, horrified, one of the earliest photographs. It wasn’t, but celebrating photography’s 150th anniversary in 1989, the Observer explored how this ‘miraculous new invention’ changed our ways of seeing.

Cartes de visite – among the earliest affordable mass imagery – challenge the cliché of Victorian photography. Rather than a bewhiskered paterfamilias in his Sunday best, rigid and unsmiling as required by long exposures, they display surprising diversity and a taste for sensation. Alexandra, Princess of Wales, gives her daughter a piggyback; a bare-bottomed boy gets smacked; there are giants, severed heads, bearded children, chimney sweeps and celebrities.

Another feature explored the visual trickery of Victorian ‘spirit’ photography – ghosts, ghouls, wraiths and spectral presences. Apparitions were conjured with simple techniques including multiple exposure, montage and double printing. This ‘paraphernalia of deception’shifted gradually from swindler’s trick to innocent family entertainment before making itself at home in advertising, art and the nascent film industry.

Most captivating are candid shots of ‘ordinary folk’ by Paul Martin, a 19th-century Martin Parr who used lighter, less cumbersome equipment to capture people at work and especially at play. Pictures of men and women napping, bathing and cuddling on Yarmouth beach defied the disapproval of an 1898 photographic journal, which berated ‘Hand-camera fiends who snap-shot ladies as they emerge from their morning dip.’

The special edition closed with legendary Observer photographer Jane Bown’s ‘Room of My Own’. Her farmhouse drawing room was full of animals – ceramic, sculpted, painted and a real dozing Labrador – but contained only two photographs: one of her daughter and one of the formidable Observer former picture editor, Mechthild Nawiasky, who hired Bown. Having fallen into photography at the end of the war (she enrolled on a photographic course, she explained, because ‘it didn’t seem boring’), Bown was wonderfully understated about her gifts: ‘There’s not really anything to say, I stick my camera up and I take a picture.’

When the photographer Lindokuhle Sobekwa was six years old, his half-sister Ziyanda disappeared. On the day in question, the siblings had had a fight, Ziyanda, who was about to turn 13, having demanded that he hand over some money he’d been given by his father. Lindo refused, and ran away, and his rebellious sister duly chased after him. But then, disaster. He wasn’t concentrating on the traffic; a car hit him, an accident that broke his spine. He would spend the next three months in hospital. Ziyanda, though, kept on running, not even stopping to check up on him. It would be 11 years before he saw her again.

No one in the family knew where she was until, in 2013, Lindo’s mother discovered that she was living in a hostel not far from the family’s shack in Thokoza, a township east of Johannesburg. She was very ill, and there were scars on her back, but now she came home at last, no longer the wild girl of old. Her brother was angry. He had a lot of questions. But the two of them didn’t talk much. She needed to rest, and something told Lindo, then about to finish secondary school, that he should tread carefully.

View image in fullscreen

In his free time, he was studying at a Thokoza photography education programme called Of Soul and Joy. On the only occasion that he tried to take her picture – the light had fallen on her face in such a beautiful way – she gave him a stony look, as if to say: “If you take this photograph, I’m gonna kill you.” Thanks to this, when she died soon afterwards, their mother could find only one image of her for the funeral notice: in a family group, taken at Christmas. His mother carefully cut her face from this picture, to be scanned and enlarged. The little square she then kept in the Bible that she read every night by candlelight.

View image in fullscreen

In Sobekwa’s new book, I Carry Her Photo With Me, there is a black and white portrait of his mother, Nomasindiso, reading this Bible in bed, her finger slowly tracing a line. It is, he agrees, an incredibly intimate picture, but it also speaks to the culture of South Africa’s townships where electricity is patchy, if available at all. “Looking at stuff at night by candlelight does something in terms of the detail you see,” he says. “It is hard to distract my mother when she is reading.” His book is first and foremost about his sister, and in it, he traces her footsteps, gathering up the scant things she left behind, and talking to those who knew her: as he puts it, it comprises a series of absences that form “a kind of map” on the page, and in this sense, it’s intensely personal.

View image in fullscreen

But like his mother, who only does what many thousands of other South Africans must when she lights a candle at bedtime, Ziyanda is also an everywoman. “She’s not the only one this ever happened to. In South Africa, you will hear this story all the time. Every taxi driver will tell you about an uncle or someone else in their family…” Even in Sobekwa’s own family, Ziyanda wasn’t the first to disappear. “You can trace it back to my grandfather, who first came to Johannesburg to work in the mines,” he says.

View image in fullscreen

Putting the book together hasn’t answered all his questions, nor has it resolved his grief. “This is an ongoing dialogue,” he says. “It’s sort of open-ended… unresolved.” But so much good has come out of it even so. For one thing, the work itself is so beautiful and so stirring: a pink party dress against bright green breeze blocks; a young woman in red with her back turned to the camera, every bit as reluctant as Ziyanda was to have her portrait taken; two shadows looming over a grave in the Eastern Cape (Ziyanda grew up in the countryside there, raised by her grandmother, while her mother worked as a live-in domestic worker in Johannesburg, and it’s also where she is buried).

View image in fullscreen

For another, there is the effect it has had on his family. Sobekwa has learned a lot. He knows now that she suffered: “She was born in 1989, before the release of Mandela. It was a very violent time here, and a lot of people died. They sent her away [for her own safety], but perhaps that was also a kind of violence for her.” But like many South Africans, he also believes in ancestors: “I think she’s with us, that she’s guiding us,” he says. “My sister was a person who wanted our family to have uncomfortable conversations, and I’ve been able to bring us to do that: to talk about all the things a family should. It has opened an interesting path for us, and we are still walking down it.”

• I Carry Her Photo With Me is published by Mack (£30)

Dora Maar is renowned as Pablo Picasso’s “weeping woman”, the anguished lover who inspired him to repeatedly portray her in tears. Now a London gallery is seeking to re-establish her as a pioneering surrealist artist in her own right, with an exhibition showcasing photographs recently discovered in her estate.

The exhibition, which opens at the Amar Gallery in London on 16 June, will include rare surrealist photograms and intimate photographs dating from her time with Picasso. These include two extraordinary portraits of him from the 1930s and one charting the creation of his anti-fascist masterpiece, Guernica, in his studio surrounded by paint pots. The works were bought at auction from Maar’s estate two years ago and have never been exhibited in a public gallery before.

Paris-born Maar was a respected experimental photographer whose work was about to appear in the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London alongside Salvador Dalí and Man Ray when the French surrealist poet Paul Éluard introduced her to Picasso. In an encounter at the Cafe des Deux Magots in Paris, ­documented by art critic Jean-Paul Crespelle, 54-year-old Picasso noticed the 28-year-old Maar at a nearby table, repeatedly driving a penknife between her fingers into the wood. “Sometimes she missed and a drop of blood appeared between the roses embroidered on her black gloves,” Crespelle wrote.

View image in fullscreen

This “strange game” of the ­masochistic young woman with the “serious face” and “pale blue eyes” intrigued the artist, an infamous womaniser already in a seven-year extramarital relationship with one of his muses, Marie-Thérèse Walter.

Later, after he and Maar had embarked on their nine-year affair, Picasso would ask Maar to give him the gloves so that he could “lock them up in the showcase he kept for his mementoes”, Crespelle wrote.

“When Dora met Picasso, she was already a gifted artist and her surrealist photographs were considered revolutionary,” said Amar Singh, curator of the exhibition. “But Picasso was extremely controlling and psychologically abusive, and she was discouraged by Picasso to continue with her photography.”

Unlike Picasso, Maar was a leftwing political activist when they met. In 1934, she was one the few women who had signed “Appel à la lutte”, a tract calling on French ­people to fight fascism, and in 1935, she had joined the anti-fascist Contre-Attaque union of revolutionary intellectuals alongside the surrealist André Breton. “She ­influenced Picasso to paint Guernica – he had never entered political painting before,” said Singh.

“I don’t think Guernica would have existed without Dora Maar. Yet she’s been completely eradicated out of that narrative.”

During the Depression, Maar captured blind street peddlers, shopworkers and street children in evocative black-and-white photographs. She taught Picasso some of her photographic techniques and encouraged his political awareness. When Guernica, a town in Picasso’s native Spain, was bombed in 1937 by fascists and anti-communist nationalists, Picasso expressed his “abhorrence” of war and its “ocean of pain and death” by painting in monochrome.

“Maar’s practice of photography influenced the art of Picasso – she had a great influence on his work,” said Antoine Romand, a Dora Maar expert. “She contested him. She pushed him to do something new and to be more creative politically.”

One of the photos in the exhibition shows Maar was given exclusive access to Picasso’s studio to photograph the progress of his painting of Guernica. She even painted some of the dying horse in the painting, at Picasso’s request: despite her success as a photographer, he thought she should exchange her camera for a paintbrush, declaring that “inside every photographer is a painter trying to get out”. By 1940, her passport listed her profession as “photographer-painter”.

View image in fullscreen

“While he’s discouraging her away from surrealist photography, she’s encouraging him and pushing his artistic boundaries in a way which completely reshaped the history of art,” said Singh.

Picasso painted Maar more than 60 times, usually in tears. In 1943, three years before he ended the ­relationship, he met his next ­mistress, Françoise Gilot. “He ­psychologically traumatised Dora and she eventually had a nervous breakdown,” said Singh. After being taken to a psychiatric hospital and receiving electric shock therapy, Maar turned to a life of religious seclusion and ceased photography.

“She said ‘after Picasso, there can only be God’. She totally abandoned her practice of photography,” said Romand.

She died in 1997 at the age of 89. Her photographs of Picasso were found under her bed in an apartment filled with his paintings of her. “She would wake every morning looking at his work, and was never able to love again,” said Singh. “Their relationship decimated her.”

Interest in Maar’s work has reignited over the past decade and her surrealist photographs can now be found in the permanent collections of modern art museums all over the world, including the Tate, which held a retrospective of her work in 2019. Her rare surrealist photographs now sell for $200,000 (£158,000), but some are still priced at about $6,000.

Singh thinks that, like many female artists of the past, Maar is still overlooked. “One of the unfortunate archetypes in art history is: there will be a singular show – then the wider machine recalibrates to champion the men.”

Sunday, June 16, 2024 3:46AM

The Buffalo Soldiers were African American soldiers who mainly served on the western frontier following the American Civil War.

Copyright © 2024 WTVD-TV. All Rights Reserved.

From advanced research to simple everyday utilities, artificial intelligence has become an integral part of our lives. It has silently made our lives so easy that a detox from technology would be almost impossible for many. What bothers many people is how AI has also encroached on the world of creativity. It can potentially replace photographers, artists, musicians and other creators. Building on this concern, a photographer recently entered a real photo he captured into an AI image contest and even won, as per PetaPixel. But soon, things backfired.

Miles Astray had a motive when he entered his original work into the “AI category” of the 1839 Color Photography Awards. “I wanted to show that nature can still beat the machine and that there is still merit in real work from real creatives,” he told the outlet. The remarkable photo captured a flamingo standing on a white-sanded shore with its head, probably, buried within its back feathers. Astray named this incredible shot “Flamingone” and asked his followers to vote for his photography on Instagram. This photo not only impressed the judges who awarded it third place but also garnered the maximum votes from people making it the winner of the “People’s Vote” award category.

“After seeing recent instances of AI-generated imagery beating actual photos in competitions, I started thinking about turning the story and its implications around by submitting a real photo into an AI competition,” Astray explained. Surprisingly, none of the competition’s judges suspected the image to be a real capture. Experts from The New York Times, Getty Images, Phaidon Press, Christie’s and Maddox Gallery were on the panel and everyone considered Astray’s entry worthy of an award. However, knowing the truth behind the picture, Astray was eventually disqualified. In a statement to the media channel, the competition organizers expressed their appreciation for Astray’s motive of spreading a “powerful message,” yet they had to be fair to other artists.

So, the award was revoked and the announcement of the winners of the 1839 Awards did not feature Astray’s work. “Our contest categories are specifically defined to ensure fairness and clarity for all participants,” a spokesperson for the competition said. “Each category has distinct criteria that entrants’ images must meet. His submission did not meet the requirements for the AI-generated image category. We understand that was the point, but we don’t want to prevent other artists from their shot at winning in the AI category,” they added. Calling it a “message of hope,” the organizers believe that Astray’s win might bring awareness to artists concerned about AI replacing them.

Speaking of AI replacing artists, a professor developed a tool named “Nightshade,” which poisons AI image generators to safeguard artists. Since original artworks are being stolen and used by AI generators, a computer science professor, Ben Zhao, from the University of Chicago, came up with Nightshade, as per My Modern Met. This manipulative tool will inject the invisible pixel into the plagiarists’ artwork and when it is uploaded to an AI set, the image will be distorted. Only the ability to copy the artwork will be impacted, so AI generators will only use legitimately licensed content to train their AI.

You can follow Miles Astray (@milesastray) on Instagram for more photographic content.

HATTIESBURG, Miss. (WDAM) – Hattiesburg’s Historic Eureka School is hosting a unique exhibit of photographs from a Hub City native and Marine Corps veteran, who worked in the field of photography for more than 40 years.

An opening reception was held Saturday for an exhibit called, “Capturing Community.”

The exhibit includes 40 black and white photos taken by Earlie Hudnall Jr.

Hudnall was born in Hattiesburg and served in the Vietnam War before becoming a long–time staff photographer for his alma mater, Texas Southern University.

“It’s Texas photos, from the Third Ward primarily, in Houston, but it’s a reflection of Hattiesburg as well,” Hudnall said. “The universality of the human spirit is what I tend to try to capture with my work.”

The exhibit. which runs thro9ugh Aug. 31, is free of charge and open from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays from noon to 2 p.m. Saturdays.

“We are delighted to have the opportunity to bring such a renowned photographer, who’s local to the area, back to showcase his work in the town he grew up in, with the community he grew up with,” said Vanessa Molden, Hattiesburg’s Sixth Street Museum District operations/education supervisor.

Hudnall retired from Texas Southern University in 2020.

Want more WDAM 7 news in your inbox? Click here to subscribe to our newsletter.

Copyright 2024 WDAM. All rights reserved.

Summer is finally here, and it’s the perfect time to embark on your next photographic adventure. You’ve meticulously scouted locations, carefully booked your night stays, and secured that reliable rental car. But have you honestly considered all the essential gear to make your photography adventure a thrilling success?

Summer is synonymous with hot days, ice cream, and time at the swimming pool. But for us photographers, it’s also the season of road trips! I recently embarked on the ultimate ten-day American road trip, Route 66. This road trip was a true adventure stretching over 2,400 miles across eight states. Over the last two years, I have taken several weekend trips, including visits to White Sands National Park and Zion National Park. I also hit the road twice last year, traveling through Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota. I packed the car and headed to Colorado to visit Great Sand Dunes National Park and Mesa Verde National Park.

Every road trip came with challenges, from maximizing space in limited baggage to the luxury of almost unlimited space in a rental car. But I was determined to overcome them, and here’s the gear that helped me overcome these challenges and reassured me of its adaptability in various situations!

Several years ago, a sales rep who had visited the camera store where I worked introduced me to the Hanual Procube Charger. It piqued my interest. For one, it can charge two batteries at once. I don’t like having to charge one battery at a time, as I want to complete the most work quickly. It’s a worthy friend to have on a road trip due to its fast and rapid charging capabilities, USB port, and, ultimately, it includes a 12V car lead. Now, you can plug it into your vehicle and charge batteries while hitting the open road. I placed it on the dash of the Nissan Rogue and made it easy to access while working from the vehicle. 

Introducing the most convenient battery ever created, the Promaster USB-C Rechargeable Battery. Almost every vehicle these days has a USB-C port somewhere. Occasionally, it would be best to have an easy and convenient way to charge the battery on the road or while walking around when your Hanual Procube fully charges two batteries. You plug it in with the supplied USB-A to USB-C cable and charge it directly from a power bank or a port in your vehicle. I’ll have to say, this isn’t the quickest way to charge the battery, as it takes roughly four and a half hours, but in a pinch, it’s a lifesaver!

There never seems to be enough power while on the road between trying to charge batteries, laptops, and all the other gear you have. This is especially true when you need a place to plug your laptop in while backing up images on the road. My vehicle is my office and home on the road. I sleep in the back of an SUV, and the passenger seat is set up with my laptop each evening. It allows me unlimited power for my computer while charging my iPhone through one of the USB-C or USB-A ports.

This bag is my go-to bag whether flying or hitting the open road. Space isn’t a problem for holding all my essential gear, from the camera, lenses, filters, batteries, and much more. One might say I try to fit fifty pounds of potatoes in a 5-pound sack! The biggest issue while flying is the overhead bin space, as I fly through many regional airports that support much smaller jets! The bag fits in every overhead bin or usually under the seat if I don’t stuff it and has held up through the rigors of airport security.

When traveling, I don’t use conventional luggage. How often have you seen relatively new luggage on the bag carousel, clothes falling out, or luggage wrapped in plastic wrap or duct tape? This bag has two purposes. First, I pack my tripod, hygiene products, and clothes to check in at the airline counter. Two, it’s a second camera bag. If I go for a long hike at a location, I can use this bag to haul all my camera gear and non-camera gear in one bag. This allows for a much more comfortable experience for long hikes and easy access to my gear due to the integrated belt pack that rotates to the front for easy access. Talk about a beast of a bag due to the quality. It has endured many trips through multiple airlines and bag transfers and has held up with no end in sight of retirement.

Small cables and accessories are the bane of any photographer’s existence. I have all three sizes of the EDC Pouches. These will keep you organized on the road. I use them to house my portable hard drives, cables, charging bricks, business cards, phone and computer chargers, and a light meter. These will all fit into my camera bag, keeping it organized. It also saves Mr. Money in the unlikely event I lose gear by just throwing it in a car seat!

It wouldn’t be a road trip without snacks! The Freeway Long Haulers and Organizer cubes are essential items for any road trip, long or short. From the organization of snacks to even clothing! I have used the larger Longhaul 50 with the organizer cubes to store clothes. Mostly, I use these as the go-to bags for all those miscellaneous items. Everything from snacks to an atlas, and they are pretty much a catch-all bag! When I roll up to a hotel, I grab and go and only carry less than three bags!

Don’t get me wrong; I love having the GPS hooked to Apple CarPlay. But we all know that the GPS isn’t always correct or takes us way off the beaten path sometimes, and sometimes it just doesn’t work without cellular reception! I always take along the Rand McNally Motor Carriers Atlas. It trumps paper maps if you can even find one. Overall, hands down, it is more detailed, has a spiral binding and laminated pages, and, over time, holds up better. Most of all, it is a lifeline in case the GPS fails, or it has no clue where you are!

These are just a few items you can take on your next photographic trip. The biggest challenges you will face while traveling are power and space to store all your items. As photographers, we have a good idea of the time of day, composition, exposure, and equipment we use to create our photographs. However, we don’t always consider all the non-photographic items as we tend to focus on our trip’s photographic aspect. Ultimately, I pack several must-have pieces of equipment before any road trip! What are your road trip must-haves?

Gudetama is one of my favorite Sanrio characters as I find that I relate a lot to it even though it’s an anthropomorphic egg yolk. I’ve watched its “Eggcelent Adventures” on Netflix and I also collect various stationary stuff featuring this lazy ennui-filled cute egg. I’m not alone in this obsession as the character has 852,000 followers on Instagram and has probably sold a lot of Sanrio merch as well.

Designer: Retrospekt for Sanrio

Another Gen Z thing that has been trending lately is a throwback to 35mm digital cameras. And no one does retro tech products better than Retrospekt. Their latest collaboration with Sanrio is the limited edition Gudetama Restrospekt FC-11 35mm Film Camera which has the egg yolk character on center stage, or rather, center camera. The camera has a silicone lens cap and the body has faux leather artwork with the different Gudetama versions.

It is a pretty simple point-and-shoot camera with a 1m fixed-focus lens and built-in optional flash. All you have to do is look through the viewfinder, line up your shot, press the shutter button, and then get your 35mm film developed in your favorite film developing shop. It’s just like any other 35mm film camera except you have the Gudetama butt staring at you when you look into the viewfinder.

The camera has a 200-400 ISO with a 31mm f/9 lens and 1/120 second shutter speed. It’s pretty light as it only weighs 122g and may even be lighter than your smartphone. It’s pretty cute that kids these days are enjoying taking analog photos and having cute cameras like this one adds to the appeal.