PHILADELPHIA (WPVI) — Judith Joy Ross’ photography exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art will transport you to decades past.

Peter Barberie, Brodsky Curator of Photographs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, says this body of Ross’ work “gives us a portrait of who we are in our time and place.”

Over 200 prints are on display; many of them made in Eastern Pennsylvania.

Joshua Chuang, Organizing Curator, says Ross first discovered photography at Moore College of Art.

“Straightforward photography captured my heart,” says photographer Ross.

Ross says she went out and photographed people and that when she took strangers’ photographs, she was intensely relating to them.

Ross works in series and the exhibition starts with Eurana Park, which Chuang says “is the park that she and her siblings went to when they were children.”

Ross calls the park kind of a Brigadoon.

Her portraits capture the human experience.

“We encounter all of these individuals who are just facing everyday life,” says Barberie. “Every photograph is a very brief exchange between two strangers who are sort of united by the big camera between them.”

Ross used an old-fashioned 8×10-inch view camera on a tripod to take photos.

Ross describes her photographs as “direct and honest and evocative.”

One of her longest running series is called Jobs. There are photographs of people at work in their uniforms, along with members of the military.

Chuang says Ross’ pictures have amazing emotional depth that match “the complexity of her subjects.”

Ross also photographed inside Hazleton public schools where she grew up.

“I wanted to help support people caring about children,” she says.

She’s also photographed visitors to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in D.C. and members of Congress.

As you walk through the exhibition, you can see the progression of Ross’ work over the years.

“It’s quite epic in its arc, when you think about American history over the past 50 years,” Chuang says.

“I’m focused on looking until the world makes more sense and I see something,” says Ross. “When you get the frame right, you found meaning.”

“I hope people can connect with these people,” she says of her work.

Judith Joy Ross’ retrospective exhibition is on view through August 6.

Judith Joy Ross Photography exhibition/

Philadelphia Museum of Art

2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, PA 19130

A British photographer from Somerset, UK, who worked and lived in Ootacamund (now Udagamandalam; better known as Ooty) and Coonoor in British India, Albert Thomas Watson Penn operated largely outside of formal systems of photography such as societies and institutions, and its conventions and styles. He spent most of his life in the Nilgiris in southern India, where he worked as a commercial photographer, occasionally also contributing to ethnographic studies of the area.

Penn left his family home in Street, UK, shortly before turning twelve and, after a brief period in London, arrived in Madras (now Chennai) by 1864. He worked at the photography studio *Nicholas Brothers & Co., before moving to Ooty in 1865 to set up and operate a branch there. He married Elizabeth Eagan in 1870 and continued working there until he acquired the studio five years later, subsequently running it under his name. In 1877, a year after the onset of the Great Famine of South India, his business in Ooty slowed and he took his practice to Bangalore, where he photographed the cantonment and the relief work being carried out.

The following year, he travelled to the UK to learn more about photographic techniques and technology. When he returned the next year, he shut down the branch he had started in Bangalore in order to focus on his studio in Ooty, where business had again picked up, and which in 1880 he renamed as the Ootacamund Photo Establishment. In the decade that followed, he undertook two major photographic tours of South India. In 1902, Penn opened Reliance Auction and Commission Agency, through which he made regular sales for at least ten years after, while also running the Farrington Hotel for an indeterminate period. He left Ooty with his family in 1911 for Eversholt, England, but returned to India in 1922 to Coonoor, where he spent his last two years before succumbing to a stroke.

Also read: Bleeding Madras, George Cloth – How ‘Real Madras Handkerchiefs’ gained global popularity

Unlike many British photographers in India at the time, Penn did not affiliate himself with photographic societies or institutions such as the *Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). As a commercial photographer, his earnings came from portraits and group photographs of the British population in Ooty, Coonoor and other neighbouring hill stations. He took several of his photographs at social events such as dance balls, weddings and hunting trips and at recreational clubs where Penn was a member. He also produced landscape views of the hills around Ooty that were reminiscent in composition and style of European mountainscapes popular in Britain, in contrast to the architectural and topographic views typical of colonial photographers of the time. His panoramic photographs — which were made by joining multiple images — as well as the smaller pictures he made for printing on postcards enjoyed much popularity.

As a large proportion of the town’s population comprised visiting tourists and seasonal residents he had a constant clientele, enabling him to earn a steady annual income. His constant presence in British social circles and active participation in their recreational activities — such as hunts (he was an amateur rifle shot), athletic events, choral performances and concerts — contributed a great deal to the sustained patronage his studio received. His photographs of these events were often published in local or regional papers such as The South of India Observer or The Madras Mail.

Penn also accepted commissions for ethnographic studies of the native population of the region, which featured in such notable volumes as Ootacamund, a History (1908) by Frederick Price and Castes and Tribes of Southern India (1909) by Edgar Thurston. His images were notably different from others produced at the time: he photographed his subjects — mainly members of the indigenous Kurumba and Toda communities — as if in the course of their daily activities, such as farming, foraging, cattle-herding and even professional grooming, rather than in the static and heavily staged style that was the norm then. His photographs of Dancing Girls slumped from exhaustion or casual images of himself with his friends are just some examples of his commitment to journalistic documentation, which can be seen as early as 1876 in his work on the Great Famine of South India.

As he lived and worked far from the urban centres of colonial rule and rarely engaged with surveyors or institutions, Penn’s life has not come under much historical scrutiny. His biographical details in The Nicholas Brothers & A.T.W Penn: Photographers of South India 1855-1885, by his great-grandson Christopher Penn, were pieced together from press clippings, publications bearing his photographs and correspondences. Although Penn was a photographer of renown only in the local social and administrative circles, his photographs have since gained a wider audience. Now found in collections across Europe –– from Paris to Vienna and Berlin the largest number of his photographs are presently found in institutions in the UK, such as the *British Museum, the Royal Geographical Society and the National Army Museum.

This excerpt is taken from MAP Academy’s ‘Encyclopedia of Art’ with permission.

The MAP Academy is a non-profit, online platform — consisting of an Encyclopedia, Courses and a Blog — which encourages knowledge building and engagement with the visual arts of the region.

When Nicholas Blair first showed me his photographs for the book Castro to Christopher: Gay Streets of America 1979-1986, I had many thoughts. But, I admit, the one that pushed to the forefront right away was: “Why am I not in any of them?”

I was only half joking.

Back at that benighted time in LGBTQ+ history – way before anyone added the “T”, the “Q” or the “+” – the streets that Blair’s title refers to, San Francisco’s Castro District and New York’s Christopher Street, were occupied by what would now seem like a shockingly circumscribed group of people. On any given weekend on Christopher Street, Manhattan, where I could reliably be found, nearly every person you saw you either knew, recognised, or had already had sex with. While Gay Pride marches would bring tens of thousands of us to the streets every year, on all other days our footprint was relatively small, insular and every bit as site-specific as the title of Blair’s book suggests.

In the era of these photos, nearly everything that was commonly considered “gay” either happened on these streets or was connected to them. Buttressed by the bars, those streets were the only places where you could reliably meet significant numbers of people like you, announce yourself to them by your gaze and your gait, tease and befriend them, spawn a community with them and, naturally, meet them for sex. The more adventurous among us even had sex with them right then and there.

The result was that those streets of San Francisco and New York had a special frisson and freedom. They were as teeming with eros and interaction then as today they are isolating and alienating, thanks to our smartphone myopia. Luckily, that special world can be seen in all its heat, humour and intimacy in Blair’s photos. One image in his book has elements of all three: in the foreground two figures are kissing. Behind them stand three men, each looking in a different direction yet all driven by the same goal – to see and be seen. Each is presenting and searching, preening and praying. Their expressions may be soldier straight and hunter cold, but below lies fire.

The humour and edge of those streets is seen in high relief in an image of two leather daddies in full chaps drawing money from an ATM. It presents a perfect contrast between mundane and profane. And, make no mistake, a joyous embrace of the profane had a profound role in many of our lives in those years, way before such unimaginable things would occur as same-sex marriage, parenthood or even personhood. Back then, the gay world still had the thrill of outlaw culture, though, sadly, that came with the consequence of making us targets for everything from cruel taunts to life-threatening bashings. While Blair’s photos focus on celebrating the culture, anyone who was on the scene at the time could see beyond the frame, where danger always lay in wait. While it was common to hear the term “faggot” hurled in your direction back then, I never heard or read the term “homophobia”. There’s a simple reason for that. Most people back then didn’t think there was anything the least bit wrong in treating gay people with revulsion.

Despite that, those times brimmed with possibility and excitement. The era of these photos gains even more poignancy since it straddles the time just before Aids and the years when the disease threatened to wipe out gay people entirely. For that reason, and others, it’s impossible not to look at these photos without a profound sense of loss. But that’s hardly all I feel when I look at them. I also feel warmth and wit. I feel invention and defiance and, to quote Saint Donna (Summer), “I feel love”.

In the end, I do see myself in these photos, reflected in my connection to a sensibility and an experience that, however far removed from the current world, remains embedded in something eternal: history.

• Castro to Christopher: Gay Streets of America 1979-1986 by Nicholas Blair, with an introduction by veteran music critic Jim Farber, is published by powerHouse books

In 2021, Jonah Markowitz took an interest in the section of Kensington, Brooklyn, known as “Little Bangladesh.” He hasn’t stopped visiting.

Though he grew up just a few miles away, Jonah Markowitz, a photographer and documentarian based in Brooklyn, knew little about the neighborhood of Kensington before 2021. That’s when he noticed, in New York City data from the year before, that an outsize portion of applications for new business licenses came from the area that included Kensington.

So he began to check out the neighborhood, which had been a hub of Bangladeshi life in the city since the 1970s. Mr. Markowitz expected to start a project about economic trends in an immigrant community.

Instead, he spent almost two and a half years visiting the same corner in Kensington, working on a portrait of the quiet transformation of a New York City neighborhood.

Mr. Markowitz’s effort, which was published by the Metro desk this week, provided an intimate look at one of the city’s biggest Bangladeshi communities. With photographs, videos and text, Mr. Markowitz introduced readers to a street corner where newcomers seek work in construction and food delivery, and the Muslim faithful take up nearly an entire city block during Eid al-Fitr services.

“Sometimes we get numb to reorganizing of neighborhoods, of societies around us,” Mr. Markowitz said. “This project is in some way an antidote to that.”

After a few trips to Kensington, Mr. Markowitz pitched the idea to Jeffrey Furticella, a photo editor on the Metro desk. Mr. Furticella said he had a soft spot for stories about New York’s evolution.

“One of my main hopes that I discuss with photographers at the outset is to create a time capsule of a moment,” Mr. Furticella said. “New York is always changing, for better and for worse. Communities evolve, businesses come and go. Nothing lasts forever, and I think one of the great responsibilities of the Metro desk is to provide a historical record of a city that draws global curiosity.”

Mr. Markowitz said his reporting was slow going at first. He was stymied by language and cultural barriers.

“There’s a hesitancy to let outsiders in and, vice versa, there’s a hesitancy for outsiders to spend a lot of time there, frankly,” he said. “It took a fair amount of being present and showing up every day for them to trust that I was invested in the story.”

Mr. Markowitz visited Kensington about 75 times throughout the course of the project. He went to restaurants, private homes and local businesses. He tagged along on delivery rides, attended religious services and observed dance performances, all to glean more insight on the lives, values, worldviews and experiences of those who live in Kensington.

“By spending that amount of time, we were able to explore all these layers,” Mr. Furticella said, “these important themes of labor, the immigrant experience and political influence, of changing norms in a cultural environment where it’s heavily male-dominant, but women are increasingly creating space for themselves.”

Karen Zraick, a reporter on the Metro desk, and Samira Asma-Sadeque, a freelance writer based in New York, provided additional reporting from the neighborhood. Ms. Asma-Sadeque, who is Bangladeshi American, reveled in exploring the everyday routines of the area. “It’s just about a community existing, about daily, ordinary life,” she said. “That is the beauty of it for me.”

After several months of reporting, Mr. Markowitz and Mr. Furticella came up with a clear vision of how to render street scenes in a novel way. Mr. Markowitz used a Phantom high-speed camera, which can capture film at 1,000 frames per second. Just five seconds of footage taken by the Phantom, if slowed to 1,000 frames per second, results in a video that is almost four minutes long. It weighs more than 20 pounds and is typically used in highly controlled environments or in studio settings to record car-crash test footage.

“It’s one of these grail-level tools,” Mr. Furticella said. “It’s a highly unusual use of this camera, to use it in an editorial, storytelling capacity. And it was this fabulous experiment.”

Using the Phantom high-speed on city streets was a photojournalist’s dream, Mr. Markowitz said, because it allowed him to frame unguarded moments with depth and detail. In the digital presentation of the article, a man washing his face and a worshiper bowing in prayer are cinematic backdrops to text rolling down the screen.

Now that the project is complete, Mr. Markowitz plans to make regular visits to Kensington for the food — goat biryani and fuchka are “must have” dishes there, he said — and the friendships he has forged. Many of the families he got to know have even invited him to Bangladesh.

“I understand the smell of Istanbul,” the Turkish photographer Ara Güler used to say. And nowhere is the pungency of the city sharper than in his images of working boats on the Bosphorus. Having given up ambitions to be a film director, Güler devoted himself to making pictures in the 1950s as postwar democracy established greater press freedom. His first published story, on the city’s Armenian trawler boats, almost caused a riot at his newspaper office, when the fishermen turned up to protest about the fact that he had shown them swigging alcohol as they set out at dawn.

This picture was taken in the old caulking yards of Karaköy. The young man in the foreground invites you to imagine not only his life, but those of his colleagues beyond, at work or in conversation. “There is nothing without humans,” Güler said of his pictures. Though his image perfectly frames two distinct worlds, the skyline of mosques and minarets, and the waterside realities of shacks and barges and tyres, it is the people who count. “It was never about what venue I shot,” Güler said. “I shot pieces of life.”

Güler died in 2018, aged 90. This picture is included in an exhibition and retrospective book of 70 years of his work. He became, in the 1960s, the pre-eminent photojournalist in Turkey. He would carry with him four different Leica cameras on assignment, labelled for the different outlets for which he worked – Time magazine in the US, Stern in Germany, Paris Match in France and Hayat in Istanbul. The separation helped him think about what each audience might want, he said. It also gave a clue to his lifelong determination. He was never an artist, always a photojournalist: his aim, he suggested, was to be the honest “eye of Istanbul”.