MEMPHIS, Tenn. (WMC) – A man is accused of shooting a photographer near railroad tracks.

Steven Painter is charged with attempted first-degree murder, attempted aggravated robbery, convicted felon in possession of a firearm, and employing a firearm during the commission of a dangerous felony.

On November 19, officers responded to a shooting at the railroad tracks located at Chelsea Avenue and Bayliss Avenue.

The victim told police that he was a photographer and had been following a train route all morning to take photographs of approaching intersections and train yards.

As he was taking photos an older model dark green GMC Yukon pulled up next to him.

A man in the passenger seat asked the victim if he needed any help and then asked him for some money.

The victim told the man that he did not have any money.

The man then told the victim, “Well, I’m gonna need you to give me that phone.” and he said something about a gun, according to police.

The victim was afraid and unarmed so he ran across the street to his 2019 Hyundai Velostor.

The driver in the GMC Yukion followed the victim and pulled up next to his vehicle.

Police say the passenger of the GMC Yukon then fired a shot into the windshield of the victim’s vehicle, striking him in his right shoulder. The suspects then drove away.

The victim was taken to the hospital where he suffered a fractured pubis and had to undergo surgery.

On November 22, the suspect who shot the victim was identified as Painter, according to police.

The victim identified Painter in a six-person photographic lineup.

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“I never really paid attention to politics before the 2016 election,” confided Japanese photographer Fumi Nagasaka over video call. Nagasaka moved to New York in 2002, witnessing two Obama wins before Trump’s divisive election victory seven years ago. “When it happened I just thought, ‘Okay, this country is falling apart’. Everybody started to be angry.”

Nagasaka’s concern then was about her practice: Leaving Japan for the United States had provided her with a sense of freedom to explore creative pathways she felt were otherwise limited. “In the US, it didn’t seem to matter what kind of education you had, as long you had talent and knowledge you had opportunities,” she said. In the aughts she began shooting American street style photography for a Japanese magazine, which would ultimately shape her more personal, culture-focused work. “I wasn’t confident with my English, but photography became a tool for me to meet people,” she explained.

Harnessing this sentiment, Nagasaka subsequently undertook a series of long-term projects examining adolescence across America, Japan, Canada and Europe, publishing the books “Untitled Youth” in 2016, “Teenage Riot” two years later, and in 2022, “Marching Wolves”. In 2017, incentivised by the election result and curious to rectify her unfamiliarity with the American South, she made the first of many trips that would become her new monograph, “Dora, Yerkwood, Walker County, Alabama.”

Travelling to Dora, a town of approximately 2,300 people, with her New York neighbor Tanya Rouse (a native of Alabama, her daughter had been one of Nagasaka’s earlier subjects), the photographer quickly became privy to the contrasts between New York City and the social and physical characteristics of the wider country. “I’d been to Los Angeles and San Francisco, but I’d never really been to a small rural town,” she recalled.

“I met some great people,” she continued. “It was Halloween and homecoming, so there were football games, a parade, a dance — it was the biggest event in town, so I photographed it.” She and Rouse decided then to return every year around the same time, and the new book is a rich and intimate document of their six years moving around the county.

Using a heavy duty, medium format camera however, Nagasaka’s presence initially garnered skepticism. While teens loosened when she shared her Instagram handle and they could trace her portfolio, others were harder to reassure. To remedy this, she contacted the local newspaper. “Everybody reads it, so we reached out about my project and an article came out. People started to understand what I did then, and I expanded the project.”

While working on the series in 2020, Nagasaka took on a separate commission to document the presidential election, an experience that further highlighted a gulf in the attitudes of the friends she had made and those back in New York, as well as compelling her to confront the disparities between the racial groups she encountered.

“Trump supporters were easy to find in Dora, they wore Trump hats and had Trump flags, but the Biden supporters were difficult. Nobody was putting signs up,” she remembered. “It was during Covid and in Yerkwood (a predominantly Black area south of Dora), nobody was outside. We knocked on doors, because I had photographed some people the year before, and were told that if they put signs outside, people would steal them.”

In the book itself, there are no images of flags or explicit references to politics, despite its role in the book’s genesis, having spurred Nagasaka’s initial intrigue in the South and the way politics reverberates in communities. As the photographer acknowledges in the book’s afterward, “Many people, including those who live there, sometimes associate the South with poverty and rural blight, and while it is undeniable that those things exist, what I found in Walker County was beautiful, charming and full of love.”

Instead, “Dora, Yerkwood, Walker County, Alabama” examines the human condition, employing the camera as a device to witness moments of joy and celebration, as well as quiet and tenderness. “This project changed my life and the way I see things, and this book is my love letter to the community,” asserted Nagasaka, whose care and warmth for the people she met is plain throughout.

“I didn’t want to bring politics into the project,” she continued, alluding to the book’s final form and the comfort she subsequently found in Walker County. “Even though that was happening in the town, I left it outside. I’m not a photojournalist, I’m an artist, and I was focused on celebrating this beautiful town.” Any political noise then, the viewer brings themselves, but what ultimately reads most prominently in the images is a sense of intimacy, extended from the community to Nagasaka and reciprocated in the work.

“Dora, Yerkwood, Walker County, Alabama” by Fumi Nagasaka is published by GOST Books and out now.

HERE THE EARTH GROWS GOLD, SUNEIL SANZGIRI, BROOKLYN MUSEUM

In Here the Earth Grows Gold, NYC-based artist Suneil Sanzgiri uses 16mm film projection spliced with archival footage, animation, and interviews, alongside new sculptural assemblages comprised of bamboo, family photos, 3D renderings, anti-colonial publications, and nature imagery to examine the complexities of anti-colonialism, nationalism, and diasporic identity.

The work is deeply inspired by his family’s resistance while living in Goa, India, under Portuguese occupation. Through this debut solo exhibition, Sanzgiri links this legacy with that of African countries like Angola, South Africa, Morocco, etc, during the 1960s and 70s. Despite this personal anchor, the exhibition could stretch to any anti-colonial struggles raging today and inconsistencies of what’s regarded as official history versus one’s own lived history.

Until May 5, 2024

Ask Dr. Richard Buswell how many photos he’s taken and printed over the span of his 51-year career and he can tell you exactly: 534.

“Which doesn’t sound like many,” he said in a recent interview.

Buswell just released “The Quest: A Montanan’s Photographic Journey,” which features 71 fantastic black and white photos taken over the course of decades, mostly at abandoned homes and townsites that are slowly fading into the Montana landscape.

Buswell, a native of Helena, made his living as a doctor of immunology and allergy for 37 years, but his passion for the past five decades has been roaming the Montana landscape, meticulously taking photos on film.

“I’m definitely old-fashioned,” he said. “I wouldn’t know what button to push on a digital camera.”

He started out in 1971 with two Nikkormat cameras. He uses four lenses, a 50 mm f1.4, a 105 mm, an 80-200 zoom and a 24 mm wide angle, as well as a tripod.

The cameras are completely manual and his bag weighs more than 40 pounds, he said. His favorite subjects are abandoned homes, mines and towns. His medical practice drew people from across the state and they would often give him tips on where to photograph. He also has a library of historical books on Montana ghost towns which also help him find his subjects.

“I spend two, three, four hours waiting for the light to be right,” he said.

He interviewed the renowned photographer Ansel Adams several times and took his advice to heart for his own work, Buswell said.

He develops his own film and makes his own prints in his home darkroom.

The prints featured in “The Quest” are often haunting, beautiful and abstract — rust patterns that look like eyes, weathered dolls from a different era, a stack of peas in their husks, a row of pike’s teeth.

One can get lost in a Buswell photo, they are profoundly simple and yet complex. His work has been collected by 234 museums, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Seattle Art Museum and his entire collection, printed on acid-free paper, resides at both the Montana Historical Society Library and the Beinecke Library at Yale University.

“The Quest” is his seventh book and one of his last, he said. At 78, he said he is all but done taking photographs — he can no longer carry the heavy pack or walk the miles to get to his subjects, he said.

He is currently working on an eighth book.

His advice for film photographers?

“It takes patience for one thing,” he said. But beyond that, there is the longevity of silver prints.

“A compelling reason (to shoot film) is the life expectancy of the prints,” he said.

“The Quest” is published jointly by the Montana Historical Society Press and the University of Montana Press. It is available at bookstores and online vendors such as Amazon.

    Cloth doll (2020). (Richard Buswell photo)
  

    Pike head (2019). (Richard Buswell photo)
  

    Cabin Chinking (2016). (Richard Buswell photo)
  

An outstanding archive of letters written to clan chief The Mackintosh of Mackintosh, the majority personal autographed letters from the British Royal Family, are coming up for auction in the Books, Maps & Manuscripts Sale at Tennants Auctioneers on December 13 with an estimate of £1,000-£2,000.

Written in the first half of the 20th century, many of the letters discuss shooting at Moy Hall, the seat of the Chief of Clan Mackintosh, and were written by Prince George (later King George V), Prince Edward (later King Edward VIII), and Prince Albert (later King George VI). 

In addition, there are letters from Queen Mary, the Duchess of Albany, and the last letter written by The Mackintosh’s son, Angus, before he died in North America in 1918. Alfred Donald Mackintosh of Mackintosh (1851-1938) was the 28th Chief of Clan Mackintosh and Chief of Clan Chatton. He and his wife divided their time between Moy Hall, near Inverness and Cottrell House in Glamorgan, his wife’s family home. A great friend of King George V, he devoted a great deal of his time to hunting, shooting, and fishing.

On a similar theme is an interesting manuscript diary giving a unique insight into the life of a young aristocrat and army officer in the late 19th century (estimate: £200-£400). Covering the period between March 25 and December 31, 1878, the diary is thought to have been penned by William George Frederick Cavendish Bentinck (1856-1948), father of the 8th and 9th Dukes of Portland and husband of the socialist suffragette Ruth Cavendish Bentinck. 

The fascinating entries detail military training, dinners and London balls, theatre and racing trips, hunting, the House of Lords, grouse shooting, house parties at country estates including Sledmere and Nun Appleton, and a tour of France and Italy. In addition, the young Cavendish Bentinck went to view the scene of the terrible maritime disaster in which 600-700 people died when a pleasure steamer and a coal transport ship crashed on the Thames east of Woolwich. He recounts: “a steam launch…. Takes us down the river to where the collision between the Princess Alice and Bywell Castle took place we see innumerable boats dragging for dead bodies and about 7 recovered whilst we are on the spot on our return to Deptford we stop at Woolwich to view 75 bodies of the unclaimed drowned a ghastly and terrible sight”.

A further interesting diary in the sale is a First World War ‘Trench’ Diary written by an unknown Yorkshire soldier (estimate: £150-£250). The writer, thought to have been a signaller in a Royal Artillery company attached to the 49th West Riding Division, details life in France beginning with the journey to Le Havre on April 12, 1915, and going on to note details of laying signals, handling horses, visiting towns and villages, meals, injuries, shelling and the mud and rain. The diary ends abruptly on December 19, 1915 with an entry regarding a gas attack. This coincides with the first use of Phosgene gas against British Soldiers, in which the 49th (West Riding) Division was attacked north of Ypres.

Sony BBC invites entries for the third edition of the photography competition Earth In Focus. Rooted in the belief that every photograph tells a compelling story, this year’s theme Pride of India celebrates India’s architecture, cultures, and people. The contest empowers photographers to embody the role of storytellers. Earth In Focus invites photographers of all levels to participate and share their unique perspectives within the subcategories of Wildlife, Portraits, and Monuments.

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Thiruvananthapuram Bird Race: 190 species observed

The month-long competition allows people to cast their vote for their favourite photos from amongst those submitted. The contest will be judged by Supreet Sahoo, an avid birdwatcher and an award-winning photographer with a specialty in tropical bird photography. During his years in the tropical rainforests of Costa Rica, Ecuador, Colombia and several countries in Central and South America, Supreet has photographed over 3000 species of birds. He started his bird photo tour company Tropical Photo Tours in 2017.

The winners will get a chance to be featured on the Sony BBC Earth channel. Additionally, the top 15 winners will receive an opportunity to learn from Sandeep Sahoo.

For more information, visit //www.sonybbcearth.com/Earthinfocus/