Los Angeles is a city dominated by cars. Neighbourhoods are divided by highways that were constructed to cut certain communities off. The idea that LA is a superficial place arose from each of us being in our own automobile bubble, not having face-to-face interactions. As a photographer, I always felt stifled in the car. I had an itch to be outside. But I was thinking about how I could use the car as part of my work. Eventually I realised it could be a mobile studio, with sunroof, windows, tail and headlights. I drive a 1983 Mercedes that was my dad’s for 20 years. I bought it off him two years ago. It runs on vegetable oil that I “dumpster dive” for, from restaurants throughout LA. So not only am I driving for free through the city, I’m also producing fewer emissions. It’s my way of surviving in a car-centred society.
There are so many examples of really, really good car photos: Mike Mandel’s shots of people driving cars, Henry Wessel’s work on traffic, Nan Goldin’s Misty and Jimmy Paulette in a Taxi, NYC, Bruce Davidson’s couple intertwined in the back of a car. I intentionally wanted to address that American tradition, but making it about the inside more than the outside of the car – the vehicle is the destination.
Car ownership in LA, where I grew up, is hugely divisive. Between the ages of 14 and 17, I lived in the suburbs. I had few friends and struggled with the social climate of the area. It was a very lonely time. I used to take the Metrolink train into the city to photograph what was available to me, which turned out to be Angelenos on public streets. I would go to dense parts of LA, like downtown and Hollywood, and take candid photos of strangers.
But street photography wasn’t what I wanted to do. Once I had the friends I’d always longed for, I realised what I wanted to do was talk about my life and my relationships, to be intimate in a way street photography isn’t. Now I photograph what I know – and what I know is my dad’s old Mercedes, its old leather seats, the sound of its shoddy speakers, the hum of the engine, the faces of my friends, the way they move and smile. And for that, I am grateful.
In the summer of 2022, I began the series this image belongs to. It was originally shot as my first assignment, The First Car, for the New York Times. The series is about my friends and their first cars, and how we’ve managed to come back into touch with one another through our automobiles following the isolation of the pandemic.
When you’re 20, it’s awesome to have your first car, loaded up with friends, playing music, going on a road trip. In this, we were going to Santa Paula, winding through incredible mountain scenery, surrounded by orange groves and rocky cliffs. We were just descending from the mountain as the sun trickled through the car windows. I was screaming because it was so beautiful. When I looked back and saw my friends Victoria and Keni, with the wind rustling their clothes and blowing through their hair, it was perfect! The pictures look candid, but I was directing a lot. The series is now being made into a book, with an exhibition due in Beverly Hills next year.
Photographing youth is challenging, because it’s so fleeting. I’m 22 and in some ways it’s already past me. This isn’t a sustainable project – 20 years from now, I’m definitely not going to be photographing teens in their first cars. But that’s part of this work’s beauty and ripeness.
Adali Schell’s CV
Born: Los Angeles, California, 2001. Trained: University of California, Los Angeles. Influences: “Lise Sarfati, Mike Brodie, Nan Goldin” High point: “Realising and creating this body of work with photo editor Eve Lyons two summers ago.” Low point: “Returning to school and normal life following the assignment.” Top tip: “Make pictures only you can make.”
The personal photographer to one of America’s most provocative rap stars has said she created a “hostile working environment” by having sex with a woman in front of him while they were travelling in a car together.
Emilio Garcia said the incident took place while he was trapped inside a moving vehicle with Megan Thee Stallion in Ibiza. The 29-year-old singer allegedly told Mr Garcia following the incident “don’t ever discuss what you saw”.
In a lawsuit filed on Tuesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court, Mr Garcia accused the singer, whose real name is Megan Pete, of harassment including a campaign of bullying over his weight.
The “harassment was so severe or pervasive” that it created a “hostile, abusive work environment” that made Garcia’s “working conditions intolerable,” the suit said.
Megan Thee Stallion said that the accusations against her are “salacious” and that Mr Garcia is using it to extort money from her.
“This is an employment claim for money – with no sexual harassment claim filed and with salacious accusations to attempt to embarrass her. We will deal with this in court,” Alex Spiro, an attorney for the singer, said on Tuesday.
The lawsuit states that Mr Garcia travelled with Megan Thee Stallion to Ibiza in June 2022 and that after a night out he was with her and three other women in an SUV when the singer began having sex with one of the other women.
“I felt uncomfortable. I was kind of frozen, and I was shocked. At… the overall audacity to do this right, right beside me,” Mr Garcia told NBC News in an interview.
Mr Garcia began working for the star in 2018 as a personal cameraman, in 2019 he quit his job to work with Megan Thee Stallion full time and did so until June 2023.
Fat-shamed
During his employment, Mr Garcia is said to have been berated, fat-shamed and treated differently by the Grammy winner.
She allegedly called him a “fat b—-” and told him to “spit out your food” and “you don’t need to be eating”.
Once the pair returned from the trip, Mr Garcia said that his pay structure was changed from a monthly flat-rate to a pay-per-task system where he was required to submit invoices for each assignment, according to the lawsuit.
“What I learned throughout the years is that, especially coming from an office environment, is… there’s no HR department in the entertainment business,” Garcia told NBC News.
“So if you don’t know that you’re being done wrong, you don’t really know how to advocate for yourself… I just really just want to encourage people to advocate for themselves.”
Megan Thee Stallion has recently been forced to remove a post promoting her Hot Girl Summer tour on Instagram because it was “too sexy”.
For three days in April, thousands of people descend on tiny Port Aransas, Texas, from all over the world when it becomes the epicentre of the sand-sculpting universe.
One of the most striking photos in the exhibition “Gerald Annan-Forson: Revolution and Image-Making in Postcolonial Ghana (1979-1985)” shows Flight Lt. Jerry John Rawlings in September 1979, just three months after he led a junior officers’ coup in Ghana and as he prepared to relinquish power to a democratically elected president. Rawlings, the populist chairman of the short-lived Armed Forces Revolutionary Council, looks the spitting image of a revolutionary as he stands in the foreground assertively facing the camera, wearing army-green fatigues tucked into black boots, an angled military beret and dark sunglasses, rows of soldiers with rifles in formation behind him.
It’s a compelling image by Gerald Annan-Forson, 76, a significant photographer of Ghana’s political history whose work is being shown in the United States for the first time, at the Howard University Museum at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center.
“The exhibition comes out of an attempt to put [Annan-Forson’s] archive in historical context and … celebrate him as a documentarian, journalist and artist,” said curator Jesse Weaver Shipley, a professor of African and African American studies and oratory at Dartmouth College. “He’s someone who was one of the more important image makers in Ghana over the decades.”
Annan-Forson began his career as a freelance photojournalist in Ghana in the late 1970s, documenting political transitions and affairs of state in the West African nation, with a particular eye for intimate moments and more offbeat or unlikely compositions. He published his work in outlets including New African, West Africa, African Business and Essence.
The exhibition, a previous iteration of which was mounted at the Sharjah Art Foundation in the United Arab Emirates, includes nearly 60 larger photographs, roughly half of them black and white, plus some smaller ones displayed in cases, along with Annan-Forson’s camera equipment.
It opens with a photo from the 1979 military-to-civilian ceremonial handover that juxtaposes President Hilla Limann in a traditional kente cloth robe and Rawlings in his fatigues. Annan-Forson captured the shot so that Rawlings, seated behind Limann, appears almost perched on top of the incoming president’s head. It’s both uncanny and prescient in light of the fact that Rawlings would two years later seize power back from Limann in another coup — then rule the country for 20 years, first as military leader and then as a two-term democratically elected president.
“If this whole exhibition was one image, this [photo] tells a story of revolutionary Ghana, of hope, of violence, of possibility, of lost opportunity,” Weaver Shipley said, noting that it was also part of a wider “global moment” of 1970s idealism giving way to ’80s neoliberalism.
Other works allude to violence, such as a moving photo of Rawlings, in a formal officer uniform, helping carry the casket of a colonel killed in the June 1979 coup. A black-and-white image of a lone soldier keeping guard after the junta dynamited a market in Accra conveys an eerie desolation.
The photographer, who traveled from Accra for the exhibition’s opening, in an interview described the at-times-dicey moments behind some of the shots and how, as a freelancer, he sometimes felt like he didn’t have a choice in what he photographed under military pressure.
“It wasn’t an easy thing because the guns and I didn’t agree,” Annan-Forson said. “In many ways, I was afraid to say no, and at the same time I had to please people. … I’m the one with the camera. I’m shooting film — they are shooting bullets.”
The son of a Ghanaian father and a British mother, he was born in London and moved as a child to pre-independence Ghana (then Britain’s Gold Coast colony), where he became interested in photography at a young age.
“In 1958, I was in Ghana International School, and we learned to swim. Someone took a photograph of me, and when I got the photograph, I wanted to know how come there were sparkles on the water, why did I look like a silhouette, and so and so forth,” he recalled.
A 10-minute film featuring interviews with Annan-Forson at his home in Accra, interspliced with additional photos from his archive of some 200,000 negatives, helps convey a sense of his background and personality.
Amid the political upheavals, the photographer also captured scenes of everyday life in Ghana, from market traders and gold miners to people celebrating Ramadan and traditional dancers with antelope-horn headdresses. Pictures of world leaders, including visits to Ghana by Prince Charles and Pope John Paul II, as well as Rawlings’s meeting with Fidel Castro in Cuba, highlight the country’s international connections during the era.
The exhibition loses focus a bit in its second half, with a more disparate array of work and less of a clear narrative. More problematically, Rawlings’s 1981 coup and subsequent long-running rule aren’t explained, aside from a couple of brief mentions in the labels on photos of him campaigning for president in 1992 and lighting a flame on the 20th anniversary of the June 1979 coup. The lack of a wider treatment of this major figure’s political trajectory is confusing at best; at worst, a visitor might easily leave thinking democracy was restored in September 1979 and everyone lived happily ever after.
Even if some of the historical context is incomplete, however, the exhibition sheds important light on an intriguing period of political and societal transition in Ghana — through the lens of a photographer who deserves to be better known.
Gerald Annan-Forson: Revolution and Image-Making in Postcolonial Ghana (1979-1985)
Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, 500 Howard Pl. NW. msrc.howard.edu. 202-865-8678.
A photography workshop took place at the Art Gallery in Swift Current yesterday evening, drawing in around 18 individuals interested in learning about night photography.
The class was hosted by the Images West Photographic Association and focused on tips and tricks for night photography, how to use a camera, manually focusing, and more.
Chris Attrell, local photographer and last night’s guest speaker, was elated to teach community members of all skill levels, from beginners to amateurs.
“One of the highlights for me is always showing people how to use their camera,” said Attrell. “When they find out how easy it is, you can see it in their eyes, they’re very, very pleased.”
People could register for the workshop for $25, which resulted in $415 in proceeds raised for the Swift Current SPCA.
“I did the same thing seven years ago and I haven’t seen a lot of these faces in seven years,” he said. “So I think a highlight was also a lot of us just got to see each other again and have a good time.”
Theatre Photography of Joan Marcus and Carol Rosegg Get an Exhibition at New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
The exhibit features images from Wicked, The Lion King, Hamilton, and more.
Carol Rosegg and Joan Marcus Justin “Squiggs” Robertson
The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center will highlight the theatre photography of Joan Marcus and Carol Rosegg in a new exhibition later this season.
The new show, entitled Photo Call: The Theater Photos of Joan Marcus and Carol Rosegg, features photography from the archives of the two prolific photographers that are part of the Billy Rose Theatre Division at the Library for the Performing Arts.
Curated by Doug Reside in collaboration with the photographers themselves, the exhibition will present a wide selection of photos from the productions Marcus and Rosegg have photographed over the past four decades, accompanied by the stories surrounding their experience capturing some of Broadway’s most iconic images. Shows covered include Avenue Q, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella, Finding Neverland, Hamilton, Les Misérables, The Lion King, and Wicked, as well as many more of Broadway and Off-Broadway’s biggest hits since the 1980s.
Photo Call: The Theater Photos of Joan Marcus and Carol Rosegg is the first major public exhibition of the longtime photographers’ work. Digital projections and newly made photographic prints will be accompanied by video commentary about the iconic images taken by the two photographers who shared a Chelsea studio for many years while building their separate careers.
It’s been a labour of love spanning four decades for Hereford Cathedral’s volunteer photographer, Gordon Taylor MBE LRPS whose work will feature in a special exhibition this May.
Volunteer photographer showcases forty years of people and memories at Hereford Cathedral
It was a photograph of Hereford Cathedral in the snow submitted to the Friends of Hereford Cathedral in the early 1980s that caught the eye of the then Dean, Peter Haynes.
The Friends used it as their 1983 Christmas card and it proved so popular that a second print run was needed.
In 1984 the Dean approached Gordon to ask for his assistance in creating a photographic record for an upcoming repair project. Whilst juggling his work as the Head Biomedical Scientist at the Department of Pathology and Public Health in Hereford, Gordon used his lunch breaks, Saturdays and lighter evenings to produce over 1,000 photographs and transparencies.
It was the start of a four-decade-long project to create a rich and extensive photographic history of Hereford Cathedral, its people, its worship, its mission and its ministry.
Forty years on, Gordon remains an integral part of the community as a voluntary photographer, and works with the Library and Archives team, cataloguing the photographic archive. Over the years, Gordon has captured significant events such as royal visits, major county services and large-scale development projects. But he has also spent time photographing the Cathedral gardens as they change through the seasons, laughter and smiles at community get-togethers and every hidden nook and cranny of the building.
The Very Reverend Sarah Brown, Dean of Hereford, said:
“Gordon has been and continues to be one of the constants of the cathedral community.
“His kindness, commitment to his work and knowledge of the building shine through every photograph as he puts people at ease with his discretion, humour and gentle direction.
“His work is a gift to the community and to all who are interested in this special place.
“We hope this exhibition gives you pause to reflect on the last four decades of events, people and memories of Hereford Cathedral which bring us together through times of celebration, sadness and love.”
Gordon said:
“It has been a privilege to spend these years documenting so many aspects of Hereford Cathedral and its life and I hope the exhibition will enable visitors to catch a glimpse of my own unique experience.”
Cathedral in Focus: 1984 – 2024 opens Saturday 11 May until Thursday 30 May during normal cathedral opening hours and is free to visit.
