Photography

Take a visual tour through a century of the Times archives

By in Photography

Take a visual tour through a century of the Times archives

As keeper of The Times archive, Maude Davies saw it all. Born in 1883, she started as a member of the office index staff in 1911 in various roles and would become an integral part of the archive for 30 years.

She was present when the Times offices were bombed in the Second World War but still put a paper to press and into many people’s hands. She lost her home during these 1940 raids and slept in the Times offices, which were moved underground, until she could afford a new home.

It was Davies who in 1921, as manager of the picture library, created the indexing system that is still being used today.

image

This 1927 scene shows Davies sitting in the first Times picture

Crossing the lines: photography without frontiers at Kyotographie 2023

By in Photography

Crossing the lines: photography without frontiers at Kyotographie 2023

Borders is the theme of the 11th annual Kyoto photo festival – Kyotographie – though, as the co-director Lucille Reyboz is keen to emphasise, there are no borders here. The festival brings together the work of artists from as far afield as Ivory Coast and the London borough of Hackney, with projects ranging from the trials of migration to the challenges of living with dementia.

The work displayed in each exhibition is complemented by the choice of venue. The tranquil Ryosokuin Zen temple is the space showing the work of mixed-media artist Joana Choumali.

Ryosokuin Zen Temple in Kyoto, the venue for Joana Choumali’s exhibition ‘Alba’hian’

Her photo-based scenes are embellished with delicate embroidery, a process Choumali has developed to process trauma in her life; in this case the work helped her deal with her grief over the death of her mother. Threading her emotions through visions of dawn blended with images of people in her community going about their daily business, she says: “It was as if my inner landscape was merging with my outer landscape … it gave me the opportunity to make a journal of what was happening to me. Making the work literally saved my life.”

Let It Out from the series Alba’hian
‘It’s the Deep Breath You Take’ from the series Alba’hian
‘Maybe I Grew Up a Little Too Soon’ from the series Alba’hian

By comparison, photographer Kazuhiko Matsumura invites you into a traditional Kyoto home to experience for yourself the effects of dementia on the elderly couple we imagine may live there.

The traditional family home that hosts the exhibition Heartstrings
From the series Heartstrings – a study of dementia

Looking through these misty images placed in the intimate spaces of domesticity, the atmosphere is one of a whisper of a life barely remembered, the melancholy of losing the sense of space and time and the challenges of living with the condition. Dementia touches the lives of one in five old people in Japan, which has an increasingly ageing population.

From the series Heartstrings - a study of dementia

The photography has a poetic quality, with much of the project focusing on the love and support of family. Matsumura’s purpose is not only to raise awareness of the illness but also to show the significance of the care given to those who are affected.

From the series Heartstrings – a study of dementia

Turning into another Kyoto sidestreet, a little boy on a tricycle leads you along an alley, riding right into the rhythmic world of Dennis Morris, the photographer behind iconic images of Bob Marley among other famous musicians. The work shown here, Coloured Black, captures the everyday life of the West Indian community in 60s and 70s London.

Dennis Morris’s Boy Tricycle

Morris was inspired and encouraged to take up photography by the benefactor of the church he attended as a boy growing up in Dalston. He had dreams of being a conflict photographer but instead found his frontline in his own neighbourhood documenting the sound, style and political aspects of his community as they tried to break away from the discrimination holding them back in British society.

At the heart of the exhibition is a recreation of Dennis Morris’s childhood living room
An image from the exhibition Coloured Black
An image from the exhibition Coloured Black

Style and its origins is the focus of Parallel World, an epic retrospective covering 40 years of work by renowned Japanese fashion photographer Yuriko Takagi. The exhibition has been ambitiously curated in one of Kyoto’s most sacred and ancient buildings, the Ninomaru Palace in Nijo-jo Castle.

An image from the exhibtion Parallel World

Throughout her career Takagi has travelled the world documenting traditional textiles, designs and the people wearing them that influence the grand fashion houses of our time. She displays these in tandem with her commissions for the likes of Issey Miyake, Galliano and Dior.

Left, a commission for Dior, right an example of traditional ethnic clothing
An image seen on the reverse side of a shoji, a traditional Japanese screen

Showing the work in such a historic site, where none of the display can leave so much as a fingerprint trace on the fabric of the building, presented the curation team with particular challenges and so in the first space reproductions dramatically tower above you on floating panels made from shojis, traditional translucent Japanese screens, the bonus being that you can see the photograph from both sides. In the other rooms the images are laid out to be viewed only in natural light as is dictated by the sacred traditions of the building’s heritage but this cleverly creates a subtle atmosphere that enhances the ethereal beauty of the photography.

Images suspended on Shoji panels hang in the historic Nijo-jo Castle

No conversation on the theme of Borders would be complete without reference to the issues of migration. During the summer of 2016, César Dezfuli photographed the 118 migrants and refugees he met during operations in the Mediterranean to rescue them from a catastrophic journey from north Africa to Italy. This was a time when authorities were focused on the numbers making the journey and there was a distinct lack of empathy and understanding for the migrants, many of whom were as young as 15.

People rescued from a rubber dinghy drifting 20 miles from the coast of Libya in 2016

Dezfuli was so affected by the state of the people rescued, their trauma and lack of sustenance, that he has made it a mission to follow their progress and reclaim their humanity. He began with 23-year-old Amadou Sumaila from Mali who he reconnected with through Facebook.

Amadou Sumaila at the time of his rescue from the Mediterranean in 2016
Amadou photographed in Spain

After spending years in a migration centre Amadou is now living in Spain, a trained plumber and electrician and part-time model. In 2022 he was granted humanitarian protection by the Spanish government which gives him opportunities to work and study. To date, Dezfuli has located 105 of those rescued in that single operation in 2016, and photographed 75 of them again. Some were fleeing political persecution, some from conflict, some from the devastation of Ebola. It’s his hope that telling their stories will build empathy and understanding, an opportunity to be forward thinking and prevent their plight from being forgotten.

On January 2, 2022, Aryane married Binta, his childhood girlfriend, with whom he had maintained a long-distance relationship for over six years of his journey. Their wedding took place in Conakry, the capital of Guinea, with their friends and family. Aryane, who currently lives in Bologna (Italy), has obtained Italian residency, which allows him to travel back to his country. He has begun the legal process so that Binta can be reunited with him in Italy soon.

Monroe Gallery of Photography : Sonia Handelman Meyer and Ida Wyman – Two Pioneering Women of The Photo League – The Eye of Photography Magazine

By in Photography

Monroe Gallery of Photography : Sonia Handelman Meyer and Ida Wyman – Two Pioneering Women of The Photo League – The Eye of Photography Magazine

Monroe Gallery of Photography presents an exhibition of photographs by two important and pioneering women photographers, Sonia Handelman Meyer (1920-2022) and Ida Wyman (1926-2019). The exhibition opens on Friday, April 21 with a Gallery talk by managers of the photographer’s estates, Joe Meyer, son of Sonia Handelman Meyer, and Heather Garrison, granddaughter of Ida Wyman. The exhibition continues through June 18, 2023.

The Photo League was a collective of photographers active between 1936-1951 who believed their work could change poor social conditions and champion photography as an art form in the process. The Photo League thrived as one of the most progressive, dynamic and creative centers for photography in America, and was unusual in its time as many of the collective’s members were women.

In the 1940s when McCarthyism started gathering momentum in the US, suspicious authorities decided to clamp down on the Photo League’s confrontational and uncensored representations of urban American society. In 1948, it was declared a subversive organization and blacklisted. As the league’s secretary at the time, Sonia Handelman Meyer answered the office phone when requests for comment about the accusations poured in from the media. “It got to be too much,” she told The New York Times. “They were blacklisting people”.

Both photographer’s work went unrecognized for decades. In recent years, there has been a revived interest in the radical collective that contributed incomparably towards promoting early street photography as an art form.

Sonia Handelman was born on Feb. 12, 1920, in Lakewood, N.J., and grew up in New York City. Her parents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. After graduating college in 1941, Handelman Meyer worked during World War II in the Office of War Information for the U.S. Signal Corps in Puerto Rico, and the Office of War Information in New York, and then at a news photography agency. In 1943 she joined the Photo League, where she studied with John Ebstel and Sid Grossman. She also served as secretary (the only paid position at the League) and, in 1948-50, as chair of the Hine Committee. Sonia Handelman Meyer died on September 11, 2022, at her home in Charlotte, N.C., at age 102.

The daughter of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Ida Wyman was born March 7, 1926 in Malden, Massachusetts. The family soon moved to New York, where her parents bought her a box camera when she was 14, She joined the camera club at Walton High School, honing her skills at taking and printing pictures. By the time Wyman was 16, she knew that she wanted to work as a photographer. Opportunities then were few for women photographers, but in 1943 Wyman joined Acme Newspictures as a mail room ‘boy’; pulling prints and captioning them for clients. At lunch hour, she photographed nearby laborers and office workers with her Graflex Speed Graphic camera. When the war ended, Acme’s only female printer was fired so a man could have her job. Wyman set out on her own to begin free-lance work for magazines, and her first photo story was published in LOOK magazine the same year. She joined the Photo League which further inspired her to produce honest photographs that could effect social change. By 1948 she was in Los Angeles, working on assignments for LIFE magazine. She would eventually cover over 100 assignments for LIFE. For the next several years, Wyman covered assignments for Fortune, Saturday Evening Post, Parade, and many other leading publications of the time.

 

Sonia Handelman Meyer and Ida Wyman
Two Pioneering Women of The Photo League
Until June 18, 2023
Monroe Gallery of Photography
112 Don Gaspar, Santa Fe, NM
www.monroegallery.com

Sony World Photography Awards 2023 Winners and One Refused Prize |

By in Photography

Sony World Photography Awards 2023 Winners and One Refused Prize |

During a special gala ceremony in London, the World Photography Organization announced the winners of the Sony World Photography Awards 2023. After the ceremony, German photographer Boris Eldagsen refused his prize, trying to discuss the role of AI in photography.

If you are not familiar with the Sony World Photography Awards, it’s a competition for photographers and photography artists that was established in 2007. Now, it’s one of the world’s biggest and most prestigious photography competitions in the world. It consists of four different competitions: Professional, Open, Student, and Youth.

The gala award ceremony was held in London on April 13, where the winners of the event were announced and awarded. The event was presented by broadcaster and art historian Kate Bryan.

There were over 415,000 images send in worldwide, from over 200 countries. From these contributions, photographer Edgar Martins from Portugal was awarded Photographer of the Year for his series “Our War.” The series was born from his search for the truth about the dead of his friend and photojournalist Anton Hammerl, who was killed in 2011 during the Libyan Civil War.

This year there was also a special Sustainability Prize, which was won by Alessandro Cinque from Italy. His series, “Atrapanieblas,” documents an innovative solution to tackle water shortages in Lima, Peru by special fog nets. Water is collected for the local residents by using these fog nets, which can collect up to 200 liters of water per day.

The Professional Competition Winners

The winners of the Professional Competition were selected from participants that submitted series of five to ten images. This year’s winners were:

  • Architecture and design: Fan Li from the China Mainland for his series “Cement Factory.”
  • Creative: Lee-Ann Olwage from South Africa for her series “The Right to Play.”
  • Documentary projects: Hugh Kinsella Cunningham from the United Kingdom for his series “The Women’s Peace Movement in Congo.”
  • Environment: Marisol Mendez from Bolivia together with Federico Kaplan from Argentina for their series “Miruku.”
  • Landscape: Kacper Kowalski from Poland for his series “Event Horizon.”
  • Portfolio: James Deavin from the United Kingdom for his submission ” Portfolio.”
  • Portraiture: Edgar Martins from Portugal for his series “Our War.”
  • Sport: Al Bello from the United States for his series “Female Pro Baseball Player Succeeds in All Male Pro League.”
  • Still Life: Kechun Zhang from the China Mainland for his series “The Sky Garden.”
  • Wildlife and nature: Corey Arnold from the United States for his series “Cities Gone Wild.“

Unfortunately, not all winners from the China Mainland were able to attend the gala award ceremony, but they did respond by a video message that was broadcast during the event.

All winning series can be found on the website of the Sony World Photography Awards 2023.

Photographers of the Year

There were 10 Open Category winners, from which Dinorah Graue Obscura from Mexico won the Open Photographer of Year Award with her photo of two caracara birds.

Student Photographer of the year is won by Long Jing of the Yunnan Arts University. Another Chinese photographer, the 19-year-old Hai Wang, was awarded Youth Photographer of the year. The Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi was rewarded for her outstanding contribution to photography, capturing intimate images of moments of everyday life.

For the Open Competition, the following winners were announced:

  • Architecture: Mark Benham  from the United Kingdom.
  • Lifestyle: Azim Khan Ronnie from Bangladesh.
  • Object: Mieke Douglas from the Netherlands.
  • Travel: Max Vere-Hodge from the United Kingdom.
  • Motion: Zhenhuan Zhou from the China Mainland.
  • Portraiture: Sukhy Hullait from the United Kingdom.
  • Landscape: Giorgos Rousopoulos from Greece.
  • Natural world and wildlife: Dinorah Graue Obscura from Mexico.
  • Street photography: Andreas Mikonauschke from Germany.

No Winner for the Creative Open Competition Category

If you search for the winner of the Creative Open Competition, you will find only a shortlist of photographers and not a winner. The award was first given to a German photographer named Boris Eldagsen for his image “The Electrician.” But after he was awarded, he took the stage just after the gala diner to decline the prize. He proclaimed it was an AI-generated image, part of a series called “Pseudomnesia: Fake Memories.” With his action, he wanted to give attention to the growing AI-generated images and to start a discussion on the role of AI in modern photography.

The photo is no longer shown or mentioned on the website of the Sony World Photography Awards 2023. 

Exhibition at Somerset House, London

From April 14th until May 1st, 2023, the Sony World Photography Awards exhibition can be visited at Somerset House in London. All winning photographs are showcased, including a curated selection of 20 photographs by photographer Rinko Kawauchi from Japan.  

There is also a solo presentation by Adam Furguson, the Photographer of Year 2022 winner. His series “Silent Wind, Roaring Sky” shows the remote lives of the communities in Australia’s Outback. For more information, you can visit the website of the World Photography Organization.

A Global History of Women’s Photography Includes Over 300 Artists

By in Photography

A Global History of Women’s Photography Includes Over 300 Artists
Graciela Iturbide, “Our Lady of the Iguanas,” Juchitán de Zaragoza, Oaxaca, Mexico (1979) (©Graciela Iturbide)

English readers looking to expand their knowledge of photo history are in for a treat. A World History of Women Photographers, freshly translated from French by Ruth Taylor and Bethany Wright and reissued by Thames & Hudson, is a new encyclopedia of the overlooked. The volume, which chronologically traces the work of 300 female photographers from the medium’s inception to the present day, attempts a global perspective of photography’s history. Editors Luce Lebart and Marie Robert employed 164 women writers from international backgrounds to assist in creating the book, expanding the work’s scope far beyond the biggest names of photography — and, perhaps most significantly, giving each artist equal real estate in terms of image quantity and word count.

Sponsored by the Rencontres d’Arles and Kering as part of their broader Women in Motion project, the volume both amplifies these forgotten visions and paints a decisive picture of the “historiographical vacuum” that allowed women’s work to be omitted and misattributed over the course of history. As the book’s breadth and depth demonstrates, “these women were everywhere and recorded everything,” pioneering some of photography’s most central movements. Why, then, are so few women mentioned in encyclopedic works like Raymond Lécuyer’s 400-page “definitive” Histoire de la photographie (1945), and not a single woman in Michel Frizot’s “comprehensive” Nouvelle histoire de la photographie (1994)? While the answers that Lebart and Robert provide will come as no surprise to any student of art history, their systematic approach serves as a necessary foundation for their efforts to “write another history, and to write it differently.”

In its early stages, the larger, formidable project of writing this history will inevitably raise more questions than it answers. For example, the volume — perhaps owing to constraints in both size and scope — contains major omissions when it comes to contemporary photographers. To name just a few, where is Deana Lawson? Catherine Opie? An-My Lê? But if A World History’s primary aim lies in correcting the past, such gaps can be forgiven; “history,” in this sense, is still being constructed.

Zanele Muholi, “Bona III, ISGM,” Boston, from the series Somnyama Ngonyama (2019) (© Zanele Muholi, courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yancey Richardson, New York)

In working from a more global perspective, the volume’s scholarship also seems to suggest that in the 1800s, the first women who had access to making photographs in non-Western countries were White European colonizers of those lands. Elizabeth Pulman (1836–1900), possibly New Zealand’s first female photographer, took notable portraits of indigenous Māori leaders; Marie-Lydie Bonfils (1837–1918) co-founded one of the largest commercial photography studios in West Asia, marketing images that projected a sense of exoticism; Geraldine Moodie (1854–1945) photographed First Nations people while traveling alongside her husband, an officer in Canada’s Mounted Police. In order to “ensure that the history of photography also becomes the history of everyone,” as the book champions, it is crucially important that we examine the ways in which members of underrepresented groups can (even unwittingly) participate in and benefit from other oppressive systems like colonialism. That is not to say that these women should be lifted from obscurity only to be cancelled — on the contrary, their work warrants further study precisely because of the complex interplay of power and colonial hierarchy that such images demonstrate.

Indeed, the book succeeds in unearthing a canon’s worth of unseen images from the past two centuries, providing us with everything from lush Pictorialism to crisp abstraction. The work of Palestinian photographer Karimeh Abbud (1893–1940) remained almost entirely unknown until a large portfolio of her work was rediscovered in the early 2000s, and yet it is a striking departure from the style of the period; instead of employing European-inspired backdrops in her portraiture, Abbud photographed her subjects in their own homes or painted elements directly onto her prints and negatives. In her haunting “Portrait of a Woman” (undated), she paints the very tree that seems to steady her subject, complicating questions of “reality” and inviting symbolic interpretation. The German-Algerian photographer Zaida Ben-Yusuf’s (1869–1933) photograph “Untitled (Invitation to a private view of photographs)” (1899) strikes a similar tone. A fixture of New York City’s social scene at the time, Ben-Yusuf wrote the text of her invitation alongside the figure of a mysterious, solitary young woman who averts her gaze from us; the woman stands to the right of the text as if to give it room, while both are framed by an ornately patterned curtain. In both works, the artist’s intervention is indistinguishable from “real life,” as the elements produced by the camera interact with the hand-drawn ones, as if they inhabit the same universe.

And while the photographer Laure Albin Guillot (1879–1962) received recognition during her lifetime, “paradoxically, very little research has been carried out” on her career and work in recent years. Guillot’s work shows remarkable range, as she simultaneously embraced a Pictorialist classicism while pioneering a form of macro photography that she coined “micrographie.” Micrographie décorative, plate IX (1931) marries Man Ray’s cameraless “rayographs” with the Surrealist scientific documentation of the filmmaker Jean Painlevé, demonstrating Guillot’s rightful position alongside French photography’s most distinguished figures. Stories like these abound in A World History of Women Photographers, and a review of this length can only touch the tip of the iceberg; hopefully this volume will invite further waves of scholarship to carry these women’s work on into the future.

Anna Atkins, “Alaria esculenta,” from Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1849–1850) (© New York Public Library)

A World History of Women Photographers by Luce Lebart and Marie Robert is published by Thames & Hudson and is available in bookstores and online.


American Folk Art Museum Presents a Benefit Concert With Lonnie Holley, Special Guests

Hosted by Harvey Fierstein, the evening features performances by Mourning [A] BLKstar, Marshall Allen of Sun Ra Arkestra, and Suzanne Vega.


Alleged Hezbollah Financier Charged in Multimillion Art and Diamonds Scheme

A Belgian-Lebanese art collector and alleged financier of the Hezbollah militant group was charged with money laundering and evading sanctions through $160 million in art and diamond transactions. On March 29, the United States Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of New York charged Nazem Said Ahmad and eight co-defendants with nine counts of money…


Stunning Roman Mosaic Found Beneath UK Shopping Mall

In Colchester, the first Ancient Roman city in Britain, you can now tell your friends to “meet you at the mosaic.”


​​Watch Indigenous Cinema at the Native New York Film Festival

See what makes New York a Native place on the big screen at the National Museum of the American Indian from May 5 through 7.


New York State Says No to Native Mascots

The Board of Regents voted unanimously to ban schools from using Indigenous caricatures and derogatory names for mascots and sports teams.


Hispanic Society Staff Picket Board Chair’s Manhattan Home

The small group of around 20 employees went on strike on March 27 and has not been paid since.


Framing the Revolution: Contemporary Chinese Photographs from the Jack and Susy Wadsworth Collection

More than 50 politically charged works reflect upon modern Chinese history at the University of Oregon’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art.


David Choe’s Rape Stories Come Back to Haunt Him

The artist and actor in the Netflix series Beef is under scrutiny for vivid accounts of sexual assault he made in a 2014 podcast.


A Tension in Paint Befitting Our Times

Maia Ruth Lee wants viewers to make associations as well as recognize the unstable world in which she and many others live.

Photographers

By in Photography

Photographers
image

– Hourly median wage: $18.73

– Annual median wage: $38,950

Photographers capture moments in time with images using either a digital or film camera. There are over 9,000 photographers in the U.S. who work as freelancers.

Many choose several specialties, such as wedding, food, portrait, fashion, or travel photography. Other photographers work as photojournalists, typically freelance or for an agency or media outlet in print, online, or broadcast news. Photographers may work in studios or travel for specific shoots to indoor or outdoor locations.

While the pay for photographers is not at the top of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ salary list, “[e]mployment of photographers is projected to grow 9% from 2021 to 2031, [or 12,700 openings], faster than the average for all occupations,” the agency reports. However, the BLS points out that part of that growth stems from photographers leaving the field for other jobs or retiring.

«< 1304 1305 1306 1307 1308 >»