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D.C. photographer remembered as half of Eastern Market ‘Dream Team’

By in Photography

D.C. photographer remembered as half of Eastern Market ‘Dream Team’

Years ago, Alton McDougle — then a young kid from Southeast Washington — asked his mentor Joe Shymanski a tough question: “Why do you trust me so much?”

Shymanski, an effusive guy from Michigan who sold photography in Eastern Market, had made McDougle a market assistant at the tender age of 12. This apprenticeship blossomed into something much bigger. They became business partners, served as one another’s best man and became godparents to one another’s children.

McDougle couldn’t understand why Shymanski had taken a chance on him. But Shymanski was quick to answer: “I know your heart.”

“As a mentor, he was my guy,” McDougle said. “I always looked up to him. I wanted his approval. I never wanted to disappoint him. He didn’t want disappoint me … We grew together in this life.”

McDougle and regular shoppers at Eastern Market who knew Shymanski for more than two decades are reeling after his body was found in Pennsylvania and a man was charged with his murder.

In a news release, the Calvert County Sheriff’s Office said officers responded Sept. 4 to a residence in the 2300 block of Cari Court in Huntingtown, Md., after Shymanski, 51, was reported missing by a family member.

After authorities suspected foul play, the release said, a suspect — Brandon R. Holbrook, 47, of Reedsville, Pa. — was arrested in Pennsylvania and charged with first-degree murder and other offenses. An attorney for Holbrook did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

On Thursday, the Mifflin County Regional Police Department in Pennsylvania said in a news release that they located human remains in a wooded area “within several hundred yards of Holbrook’s residence” believed to be Shymanski.

“The common denominator we believe between the two men is a common former romantic interest,” Mifflin County Regional Police Department Chief Andre French told WUSA9.

French and Calvert County Sheriff Richard Cox did not respond to requests for comment.

Ted Shymanski said his brother Joe was born in Detroit in 1971 and raised in the city’s suburbs. In high school, he was captain of the football and track teams — but also developed the love for photography he would turn into a career, taking photo classes and working in a local studio.

After getting a degree in teaching from the University of Michigan, Joe traveled the world, teaching English in Asia. After a brief return to Michigan, he set off for Honduras to teach for two years — by car.

“He drove a car down there,” Ted Shymanski said. “He drove a car from Michigan. Everyone thought he was nuts.”

After that trip, Joe landed in the District in the late 1990s and ended up teaching in a D.C. public school. He was appalled by the school’s poor conditions, Shymanski said, and had to wait until November to get his first paycheck.

He built a lifelong connection, however, with his community and his students. Though Joe didn’t last as a full-time DCPS teacher, he stayed in the city, buying a house on D Street not far from Eastern Market. When he had to gut the house, he looked to his former pupils for help, turning them loose on interior walls with sledgehammers. And when he started selling photography in the market, he enlisted some of them as helpers.

One of these apprentices was destined to take over the business.

McDougle said he met Shymanski through his older brother, who was in Shymanski’s sixth grade history class. The teacher from Michigan was in his mid-20s. McDougle was 12. When his brother lost interest in helping out at the market, McDougle stuck around.

At first, Shymanski was a mentor — like Mr. Miyagi in “The Karate Kid,” McDougle said. Soon, however, it became clear that both men had something to learn from the other. They competed artistically, each trying to outdo the other in their signature style: comical, close-up photographs of Legos. The partners even gave themselves a name: “The Dream Team.”

“He taught me photography,” McDougle said. “I taught him how to hustle photography.”

The Dream Team wasn’t just about business. When both men’s marriages ended in divorce, they supported each other, texting messages of encouragement daily. When Shymanski migrated to Calvert County, where he shared custody of his children with his ex-wife, McDougle put in more time at the market.

Now, McDougle said he’s working with Shymanski’s family to create a foundation to honor his former mentor’s memory and encourage kids to pursue photography.

“They might’ve killed Joe, but they awoke a beast,” McDougle said. “Everyone is behind him … we are going to keep his name alive.”

At a candlelight vigil Thursday, more than 100 people gathered to share memories of Shymanski. Joe taking a job shooting head shots for a law firm — then becoming the firm’s official photographer. Joe driving cross-country to meet a friend for a golf match that he won even though he had a broken foot.

Micheline Mendelsohn, who helped organize the vigil, said she met Shymanski in 2001 when she was an intern at the Canadian embassy. After enlisting him to shoot an event there, she worked with him for years, photographing events at her family’s Capitol Hill restaurants and taking photos for her brother Spike Mendelsohn, a “Top Chef” competitor.

Shymanski’s photos went beyond mere portrait photography, she said. He was able to get to the center of a crowd without drawing attention to himself, according to Mendelsohn, creating work that was more like journalism.

“He was just always there,” she said. “He was able to build an amazing community of people around him.”

At Eastern Market Saturday, that center was missing. Joe was gone.

“Everybody loved him,” Ted Shymanski said. “Multiple people said, ‘Hey, I was Joe’s best friend. For me, as a brother, I was lucky just to have him.”

Andersontown Powwow celebrates Native American traditions, culture

By in Native

Andersontown Powwow celebrates Native American traditions, culture

ALEXANDRIA — Brilliant late-morning sunlight broke from behind a bank of clouds, prompting Tim Deane to smile as he shared what brought him to the Andersontown Powwow from eastern Tennessee.

“I’ve been here for the past 10, maybe 12 years, and … it’s got a good feel about it,” Deane said as he attached feathers to a large cane. “(There are) lots of great people here, great drums, folks that will come here and dance, who actually know their stuff.”

Deane practiced his craft outside a 10-foot-tall teepee as passersby peeked inside at his collection of Native American artifacts and other memorabilia. He began collecting items and getting involved in Native American culture demonstrations more than 30 years ago.

“My kids began to dance, my wife began to dance, I began to dance and sing,” Deane said. “That’s where things began with me.”

As his collection grew and he continued to attend Native American gatherings and festivals, Deane said a sense of purpose began to develop for him. There was a message he wanted to make sure he shared with his friends and those he met at these events.

“They had lost their past, and if you lose your past, you will lose your way,” he said.

This year’s Andersontown Powwow, hosted for the second time at Beulah Park as a water infrastructure project at Anderson’s Athletic Park made that facility unusable for the event, featured many traditional favorites.

Among them were Native American dancing and drum demonstrations, a market featuring native-inspired kids crafts, and interactive talks featuring native birds and food demonstrations.

Organizers said in the days leading up to the weekend event, powwow participants fanned out across the county to bring cultural awareness programs to elementary schools in Anderson, South Madison and other districts.

“It educates our children on their community’s heritage,” said Debbie Webb, chairwoman for the Anderson Powwow. “It exposes them to different cultures, so they can understand the traditions and the things that are important to different cultures.”

Jim Sawgrass, a member of the Florida Muskogee tribe, returned for this year’s event to reprise his popular presentation involving stories emphasizing his Creek Indian ancestry. Dressed in hybrid post-European regalia, Sawgrass cooked chicken, vegetables and peppers over a small campfire as he waited to give a talk about the instruments and weapons assembled beneath a nearby tent.

“If we don’t pay attention and learn our history — the right history — then we’ll forget it, and we’ll repeat it again,” Sawgrass said. “This is a celebration of life, of an ongoing culture that didn’t stop when Columbus came. It didn’t stop when John Wayne showed up in the movies. It evolved, and it’s still evolving today.”

Webb said this year’s powwow carried special significance as it coincided with the year-long celebration of the county’s bicentennial. Among the featured native artists was Michael Pace, a descendant of Chief William Anderson of the Delaware tribe for whom the city of Anderson is named.

Pace and Dwight Gallian, a longtime historical interpreter at Conner Prairie, gave talks detailing the lives and times of settlers who arrived in the area in the early 1800s.

“It’s a chance for people to see people honoring their own heritage and celebrating that,” she said.

Why It’s Such a Struggle to Talk to New Photographers

By in Photography

Why It’s Such a Struggle to Talk to New Photographers

The other day on the street, a man stopped me and asked if I was a photographer because I was carrying around a camera. I told him that I’m a journalist and that we review cameras, lenses, etc. He then asked if I had a YouTube channel, but I instead pointed him to our app after telling him that we’re an online magazine. I didn’t feel like talking to him because the need to educate new photographers is an exhausting task equivalent to trying to help an addict recover from a vice. And obviously, it doesn’t make me want to give up on photography. But it reminds me that we don’t instill the idea of art vs. content enough.

To be a content creator, you either need to be a snake oil salesperson or an incredibly attractive one. But to be an artist, you really just have to create for yourself and learn marketing skills to become sustainable and not have to constantly create to please an algorithm. And the two, creating content vs. art, are not at all the same things.

Besides creating photography for myself, I’m also, obviously, a writer. Earlier this year, I wanted to write a poem every single day. But then I realized that this isn’t sustainable, and instead, it feeds more into the idea of making monotony every single day instead of putting out something really good a bit less frequently.

It’s also why I’ve never done a 365 photography project — the idea is daunting as I realistically don’t have enough time to do something like that. Though I commend the photographers who have done it and have done it exceptionally well. That’s why I commend photographers Sasha O and Bill Wadman, who have done it so incredibly well over the past few years.

The diffraction of community: It was more than just covid

The idea that photography is part of content creation has happened because of several reasons. We, as a community, dove really deep into the idea of everything just being online. We forgot how to speak to one another and that we should meet up. Instead, we speak to one another behind screens in groups, in comments, etc. The communities moved online, and therefore so too did the idea of the photographs. And because of that, we stopped printing. The photograph because something that everyone could do with their phones, and we stopped trying to teach people about what makes a photograph artistic.

That, too, has had to evolve beyond what the old masters did.

COVID-19 made the diffraction of communities even larger as we had no reason to meet up in person anymore.

In some ways, the online communities were great because they were very democratic. In-person meetups tend to feature a particular shade — and that has changed as the knowledge has been passed on.

Only understanding what you see online

There’s a much bigger problem with only ever getting those communities and information online: and a lot of it has to do with vetting. I’m not speaking about gatekeeping information but instead about finding credible sources. People often don’t know or think to check the information that they’ve gotten. That’s a real problem because it breeds misinformation that can often be quelled a bit more when you’re in person or checking credible sources. And more importantly, it’s a problem with new photographers.

We’re forgetting about the importance of the print

The biggest thing on this list, though, is that there isn’t enough of an emphasis on simply looking at the images. Instead, there’s the idea of blazing through them — and that’s not how art photography is really supposed to be consumed. We’re supposed to be very introspective about the photos and you get better and better at glancing over them as time goes on because you’ve learned how to think about the images. With that said, your mind starts to evolve and change from there.

The photograph can be content. But it can also be art. And we don’t teach enough of the less exploitive side of art.

Seeing the U.S. Open in an Unusual Light

By in Photography

Seeing the U.S. Open in an Unusual Light

The U.S. Open, which I have covered for five years for The New York Times, has no shortage of opportunities for staggering visuals. Especially on a sunny day, when the early afternoon light cuts crisp chiaroscuro shadows on the hardcourts, the players are easily transformed — their bodies contorted like ballet dancers and their faces transfigured by effort and focus as they emerge from deep shadow into brilliant sunshine to reach for a ball.

But the event is, and this will come as no surprise to anyone who has attended, absolutely crawling with photographers. All of the major wire services have multiple photographers on site, as do many newspapers and magazines from around the world. And while we all bring something different to our profession that allows us to make unique pictures, I am always thinking of ways to capture the event in a different light. And infrared is, quite literally, different light.

Fans walking across the plaza as seen in a photo taken with an infrared-converted camera.

Discovered by the astronomer William Herschel in 1800, infrared resides beyond the visible spectrum of humans and has been used for numerous scientific and industrial purposes since the early 1900s — and for art photography since the mid 1900s. The infrared spectrum itself is divided into near-infrared, which is just beyond red, and far-infrared. Near-infrared imaging is used for night vision security cameras or baby monitors, for example, and far-infrared is what Times visual journalist Jonah M. Kessel used to photograph Methane gas in 2019.

So perhaps it was my subconscious and heavy reliance on near-infrared — I have a 3-month-old and a 3-year-old at home — that prompted me to bring an infrared-converted camera to the U.S. Open this year. A friend and fellow New York Times freelance photographer Adam Kane Machia lent me the camera some time ago, and I had been looking for the right moment to use it.

I usually work with two cameras at the Open — one with a telephoto lens that brings me closer to my subjects and the other with a wide-angle lens that expands my field of view — but I also carried a holster with the infrared camera for those moments when I had some extra time.

The camera’s sensor assigns visible light colors to its infrared photographs, but infrared is essentially colorless. So much the same way that black and white photography strips away the complications of color, I found that infrared photography goes one step further, emphasizing the intensity of light.

At the Open, where tens of thousands of people attend on a single day, the crowds can be disorienting. But in infrared light, the players’ colorful clothes fade away in deference to their figures. Ben Shelton’s white and pink shirt becomes nearly indistinguishable from the green, blue and yellow uniform worn by a ball crew member. The swoop of a spectator’s wide-brimmed hat reflects light by the practice courts with the same intensity of a young fan’s jumbo, neon green tennis ball awaiting an autograph. Even the red, white and blue of the American flag flying high above the nosebleeds in Arthur Ashe Stadium take a back seat to the light itself.

Lee review from TIFF: Kate Winslet scores her best ever role in this biopic of a Vogue model-turned WW2 photographer

By in Photography

Lee review from TIFF: Kate Winslet scores her best ever role in this biopic of a Vogue model-turned WW2 photographer
A new film, which stars Kate Winslet and premiered at TIFF, shows how a Vogue model became a ground-breaking World War Two photographer.

Antony Penrose’s biography of his mother is called The Lives of Lee Miller for good reason. She had so many. In New York, she was a great beauty who became a fashion model, then a fashion photographer. In Paris, she was a friend of Picasso and did art photography with Man Ray. But it was as a photographer during World War Two that she did her most enduring work, black-and-white photos that offered distinct, intimate views of how the war affected lives. She saw that a lone soldier’s boot lying on a street could tell a story.

More like this:
– How a Vogue photographer fought World War Two
– Lee Miller: In Hitler’s bathtub
– The photos of grief that symbolised the anti-war movement

That period of her life is the focus of Lee, with Kate Winslet as the US-born Miller. Winslet also initiated and produced the film, based on Penrose’s 1985 book, and in a lifetime of well-chosen roles, this may be her richest. She gives us a restless, fierce, independent woman who found her voice as a witness to war, and paid the psychological price. To direct, Winslet brought on the great cinematographer Ellen Kuras, who worked with her on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and who shapes the film with supreme authority and intelligent choices at every turn.  

The opening plunges us into battle, with Miller in a helmet and army fatigues running through a street trying to escape gunfire, until she collapses against a barrier of sandbags. But that is merely a tease of what’s to come. From there we jump to 1977, where 70-year-old Miller (Winslet in convincing and subtle prosthetics and make-up) is being interviewed by a young man (Josh O’Connor) at her home, Farley Farmhouse in Sussex.

She chain-smokes, drinks in the middle of the day and tosses questions back at the unnamed interviewer. At the film’s end, there is a lovely resolution to the question of what this interview is about, but until then it remains no more than a creaky, serviceable way for Winslet to insert a voiceover now and then to get from here to there in the story. The device is too conventional to match the unconventional Miller, and the film only becomes truly remarkable when its heroine sets off for war.

Lee

Director: Ellen Kuras
Cast: Kate Winslet, Alexander Skarsgård, Andrea Riseborough, Marion Cotillard, Josh O’Connor, Andy Samberg
Run-time: 1hr 56m

Before then we see her in 1938 in the south of France. “I’d been the model, I’d been the muse, I’d been the ingenue,” the older Miller says. “I was done with that.” Still, we find her staying with glamorous friends, including Solange (Marion Cotillard), and get a taste of her free-spirited life with artists and writers. There she meets Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgård), a painter and art dealer, and in a drastic foreshortening, they instantly become a couple. (In reality, the beginning of the relationship was more complicated, and they didn’t marry until 1947 – although they stayed married for the rest of her life.)

Becoming a war photographer

Living with Roland in wartime London, she begins work as a photographer for British Vogue, whose editor, Audrey Withers (Andrea Riseborough), becomes her professional champion and great friend. And she meets David Scherman (Andy Samberg), a photographer for Life magazine whom she affectionately calls Davey and who later becomes her travel partner as they cover the war. Samberg fits as easily into the drama as Davey did into Miller’s life.

The male roles, Davey’s and Roland’s, are underwritten. That might be because they are not the point in a film that is determinedly from a female perspective. When Miller and Davey go to a British military base and she is barred from much of it because women are not allowed, she photographs the women’s barracks, their stockings and underwear hanging to dry, and a woman pilot posing in the doorway. “Only you could have taken these,” Withers tells her about those shots, and throughout the film we see how accurate that is. Miller arranges some compositions, discovers telling angles for others, and always brings a bracingly fresh eye to her work, which we often see as she hands photographs to the interviewer.

When she becomes accredited as a journalist by the US military, the film truly comes to match the importance of her work, and gives us the measure of its emotional psychological cost. She goes to Normandy, and faces fire during a battle in St Malo, France (that opening scene). Davey joins her as they cover the war across Europe. “We drove for months, didn’t wash for weeks,” we hear the older Miller say as we see them in a jeep driving through dusty streets. After Paris is liberated, she finds her way amidst crumbling buildings to visit Solange, and in one of the film’s most wrenching scenes, learns how horrific the war has been even for those who survived.

Winslet let us see the toll that knowledge takes, as Miller forces herself to look at and document the most unbearable scenes. When the war ends, she and Davey enter Germany and go to Dachau. We do not see what Miller does when she enters one room, but in the interviewer’s hand we see the photograph she took that day, of piles of corpses. Kuras modulates all this in a style that smoothly takes us into Miller’s experience and unique point of view, but with an eloquent understatement.

The war scenes speak loudly on their own, with no need to add dramatic emphasis. Alexandre Desplat’s score matches that style, with a subtle, piercing beauty. If the first half of Lee had been as dazzlingly effective as the second, it might have been a great film instead of a very good one.

Penrose’s biography includes a letter she wrote about her difficulty crossing the border into Hungary in 1945, when Russian guards pointed guns at her. “The adventures were good cinema,” she said. In the end, they certainly were.

★★★★☆

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The big picture: playtime in New Orleans

By in Photography

The big picture: playtime in New Orleans
image

Each year, a French-American photography commission called Immersion allows selected photographers from each country to work on a project on the other side of the Atlantic. The French photographer Vasantha Yogananthan chose last year to go to New Orleans, taking the notion of immersion seriously and becoming part of a community of kids at a daily summer camp; the heat of Louisiana means that holidays last for three months. With the support of parents and organisers, Yogananthan spent a long time getting to know the kids before he started taking pictures, to the point where they would forget he was there. He was struck by how, each morning, they created their own complex society in a yard the size of a basketball court. Most of the thousands of pictures Yogananthan took were at the end of his time with the children, when the freedoms of summer were coming to a close.

This picture is characteristic of Yogananthan’s images, nearly all of which were taken at ground level to give a sense of the children’s world. He calls the series – on display with work by two other photographers later this month in New York – Mystery Street. It is a place where play is still a serious business. Speaking of the pictures to one of the sponsors of the commission, the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, Yogananthan described how he wanted them to convey some of the fragile and transitory aspects of childhood. This was heightened, he suggested, in New Orleans by the way that the city had been turned upside down by Hurricane Katrina, and was still living with the memory. He thinks of the work as “post-documentary”: none of the images were staged, but stripped of visual clues of location they seem part of the children’s own ideas of time and space.

Immersion: Gregory Halpern, Raymond Meeks and Visantha Yogananthan is at the International Center of Photography, New York, 29 September–8 January 2024

‘OUR Street Night Market’ returns to Sacramento’s R Street corridor

By in Art World News

‘OUR Street Night Market’ returns to Sacramento’s R Street corridor
image

The Our Street Night Market, located along Sacramento’s R Street corridor, returned Saturday.”When you do things for the right reasons and you do things to make a cultural impact and do things for your community, no matter how tired you get or whatever ends up happening, it always feels good,” said Shawn Kahan, one of the market’s organizers. “I feel great.”The market is a tribute to the city’s arts and food scene and designed to be an opportunity to bring the community together through art and food.”We try to seamlessly work our way into the neighborhood,” he said of the installations throughout. “We want it to feel like places are activated but we want it to feel like they’re supposed to be there almost.”Bringing the market to Sacramento is a labor of love for Kahan. Kahan said following the passing of the late developer Ali Youssefi, a fervent supporter of the arts and artists, he and his business partner wanted to put together an event that would honor his vision.”It was such a beautiful vision,” he said. “There’s a lot of deep meaning and purpose behind what we do.”Kahan was traveling in Asia, he said and became inspired by the night market culture he experienced there.”I thought that was perfect for something to bring to Sacramento and something that would really resonate here,” he said.Stephanie Bozzalla, of Buenos Aires Grill, said the market has become a tradition for her family’s food truck. The truck serves authentic Argentinian cuisine, including empanadas. “We’ve been coming here since 2018,” she said. “We were one of the original food truck vendors here and we’re just so proud of how far it’s come. It’s such great exposure for all the food trucks in the area. I feel like the entire city is here.”Kahan said roughly 15 to 20,000 people attended Saturday, but that he was still awaiting a final count. The market ran from 11th to 14th streets on R Street from 5 p.m. until midnight Saturday. Activities included live painting, dance performance, dance lessons, outside arcade games, a silent disco and much more.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. —

The Our Street Night Market, located along Sacramento’s R Street corridor, returned Saturday.

“When you do things for the right reasons and you do things to make a cultural impact and do things for your community, no matter how tired you get or whatever ends up happening, it always feels good,” said Shawn Kahan, one of the market’s organizers. “I feel great.”

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The market is a tribute to the city’s arts and food scene and designed to be an opportunity to bring the community together through art and food.

“We try to seamlessly work our way into the neighborhood,” he said of the installations throughout. “We want it to feel like places are activated but we want it to feel like they’re supposed to be there almost.”

Bringing the market to Sacramento is a labor of love for Kahan. Kahan said following the passing of the late developer Ali Youssefi, a fervent supporter of the arts and artists, he and his business partner wanted to put together an event that would honor his vision.

“It was such a beautiful vision,” he said. “There’s a lot of deep meaning and purpose behind what we do.”

Kahan was traveling in Asia, he said and became inspired by the night market culture he experienced there.

“I thought that was perfect for something to bring to Sacramento and something that would really resonate here,” he said.

Stephanie Bozzalla, of Buenos Aires Grill, said the market has become a tradition for her family’s food truck. The truck serves authentic Argentinian cuisine, including empanadas.

“We’ve been coming here since 2018,” she said. “We were one of the original food truck vendors here and we’re just so proud of how far it’s come. It’s such great exposure for all the food trucks in the area. I feel like the entire city is here.”

Kahan said roughly 15 to 20,000 people attended Saturday, but that he was still awaiting a final count.

The market ran from 11th to 14th streets on R Street from 5 p.m. until midnight Saturday.

Activities included live painting, dance performance, dance lessons, outside arcade games, a silent disco and much more.

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