The Minneapolis Institute of Art is offering free admission to a Native American photography exhibit on Black Friday.

Molly Lax from the Minneapolis Institute of Art sat down with 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS Anchor Alex Jokich to discuss more about what the museum has to offer.

“The exhibit is called ‘In Our Hands, Native American Photography from 1890 to now’, it’s an exhibition of 150 photos taken of, by, and for Native photographers throughout history,” Lax said. “It really celebrates the ways that they’ve used photography to tell their own stories and the creative contributions they’ve made to the field of photography as a whole.”

The exhibit is set to open in the Target Gallery at 8 a.m. Friday morning.

CLICK HERE to learn more about the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

By Ted Thornhill, Mailonline Travel Editor

Published: 13:58 EST, 19 November 2023 | Updated: 13:58 EST, 19 November 2023

It’s one of the most famous streets in America – and this drone image of it by Briton Charlie Moss cements his status as a high-flying photographer.

The stunning image shows San Francisco’s mesmerisingly windy Lombard Street, captured by Charlie one morning at 4.30am, ‘when it felt like I had the place to myself’.

The 27-year-old from East Sussex continued in an email to MailOnline Travel: ‘I really like how the image shows you an unseen perspective of the road from above, bringing out the vibrant colours of San Francisco at sunrise.

‘It was beautifully peaceful and calm in comparison to the usual hustle and bustle of the city. The final image is made up of five different shots that have been stitched together to give this unusual perspective of the famous road.’

The image won Best Drone Photographer (People’s Choice) at the 2023 British Photography Awards, with Charlie describing the win as an ‘absolute honour’.

Does Charlie consider San Francisco as a whole to be particularly photogenic?

He said: ‘There are endless photography spots around San Francisco, all with completely different perspectives and views.

‘There are 11 districts in the city, all of which carry their own unique vibe and culture. From Golden Gate Bridge to Lombard Street, across to Little Italy and Chinatown.

‘I don’t think I could ever get bored of taking photographs of San Fran.’

Are there strict drone laws there?

He said: ‘The drone laws in San Francisco are pretty similar to a lot of other cities – you can fly both recreationally and commercially as long as you have the right licenses and permissions and stay within the laws/rules.’

And does Charlie have any advice for budding drone photographers? Are there any common mistakes that amateurs make?

He said: ‘Honestly, my first piece of advice would be to just get out there and take some photos, anywhere you can – having practised flying beforehand, that is.

‘I think a lot of mistakes made, even by myself now, are caused by rushing into things.

‘It’s hard to shoot at sunrise or sunset because you only have a limited window of opportunity, but take the time to learn and understand the controls and settings of your drone or camera and just practice, practise and practise.

‘My photography is representative of how beautiful the world can be. Amid times of uncertainty and madness, getting lost in photography is an escape and I’d encourage anyone who’s lucky enough to grab a camera and capture those memories.’

To see more of Charlie’s work, visit his Instagram page – www.instagram.com/charliemossphoto. 

Photographs by Diane Fleischman

Like many photographers, I own a million bags. Some have different purposes, one for day-to-day work and one for traveling, one for quick access during rainy days, one for studio days.

My first bag was a Lowepro sling bag that was like carrying a giant padded cube. As a photojournalist and street photographer, I have many different setups so I acquired quite a few different bags. The most common backpack for years amongst photojournalists was the Think Tank Shapeshifter, which allows one to carry a ton of gear each in its own padded neoprene sleeves. It also allows for quick access to two cameras with 24-70mm and 70-200mm lenses attached, the most common setup for many of us. For DSLRs it was great.

Now with mirrorless, its problems are more glaring: it’s a gigantic bag and though it zips down, it’s very heavy and cumbersome and weighs almost 5 lbs empty. This makes a difference on long days. I never liked that it is obviously a camera bag or at least a bag with electronics inside. Think Tank briefly tried to make a “naked” version and a smaller version but neither worked very well and were soon abandoned.

For years after I tried using noncamera bags, a North Face Recon, Topo Daypack, Prometheus Design Werks, and lastly a variety of Go Ruck bags. Each worked reasonably well and I liked that they were more discreet than a camera bag. The main problem was that they usually had no laptop compartment (North Face, Topo) or no sections to separate cameras from each other, lenses, and things like lunch, extra jackets, etc (Go Ruck). The Prometheus Design Werks had dividers and a laptop compartment but the cameras slid around on the inside and the backstraps were not very cushioned given how much it was intended to carry.

The Go Ruck bags were my go-to for years but they are extremely expensive and have no internal dividers.

Enter the Cutline A1. Developed by a photojournalist, it is the best hybrid bag I’ve seen so far.

It’s lightweight, weighing in under 3 lbs, but tough enough for daily assignments. It has Molle stitching in both horizontal and vertical so you can strap camera bodies, lenses, or flashes so they don’t hit against each other, or you can add pouches on the inside like the shapeshifter.

Clever orange velcro straps allow things to be suspended within the bag but are easy to undo or reattach in a hurry. It has two side pockets for small items such as mobile hotspots, laptop batteries, a passport, etc. Two zippered compartments on the exterior make it easy to stow a press pass, a granola bar, some keys, or things like a laptop cord. It has enough pockets but not too many where you forget where things are.

Having the side access to the laptop allows me easy access in a car or on the sidewalk when filing pictures. You can add a pouch for a water bottle or extra lenses on the front or attach them on the backpack straps.

The Cutline bag itself slims down when you’re shooting with your cameras out, something that comes in handy while covering protests or politics where there isn’t a lot of space to move around or packing it into a suitcase when traveling.

The zippers are the perfect size for durability, but not as heavy as the Think Tank ones, which seem overbuilt and clunky. The Cutline zippers are water-sealed eliminating the need for excess fabric. Instead of clips, the bag uses Fidlock magnetic fasteners, which are both easy to open and close and lighter. It doesn’t look like a camera bag and has better-padded straps and back panels than any other bag I’ve used.

The modularity allows for combinations of setups, which is particularly good for traveling or switching from journalism to street photography. It can hold big mirrorless zooms, but then shrink down if you want a day with just a couple of primes. For portrait days it can hold a Profoto B10+ with a couple of lenses.

There are a couple of things I’d like to see in future bags: a built-in water bottle pocket would be nice. I’d love a smaller version of this bag, maybe 15L for even more pared-down setups and different even lighter fabrics like X-Pac.

Will this be the last bag I ever buy? Probably not. I still love my Domke 803, which I’ve used longer than any other. The rest have been sold or live in a closet. But the Cutline one is pretty close to the perfect modular bag for a working photographer I’ve seen yet.

About the author: Stephen Yang is a freelance photojournalist from New York City. Along with covering day-to-day news and features in New York, he has spent time covering the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in North Dakota, social uprisings in Hong Kong and Baltimore, and hurricanes in Florida and Puerto Rico.

Stephen’s work has appeared in The New York Post, The New York Times, Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, Der Spiegel, and Newsweek among others and his archive is syndicated by Redux Pictures. When not shooting, he is usually trying to find a better sandwich and spicy Chinese food. You can see Stephen’s work on his website and Instagram.

Image credits: Photographs (unless otherwise indicated) by Stephen Yang

(Credits: Far Out / Araki / Taschen)

Kenji Endo is slumbering in his student room, casually listening to the sound of American rock ‘n’ roll, which has now become commonplace on Japanese radio since the days of post-World War II occupation. Only this time, the half an ear he is lending it is suddenly perked up by the sound of Bob Dylan’s counterculture masterpiece, ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. It rudely snaps him out of his slumber, and he wonders to himself whether this tripe can even be considered music at all. He attempts to turn off the radio.

By the time of Endo’s third listen, he is rushing off to inform his friends of Dylan’s brilliance. “This guy is creating something that has never been created before,” he proclaims to his roommate, but it could’ve just as well been a stranger in the street had his college buddy not been more conveniently placed to hear of Enzo’s good tidings. You see, for so long, Japan had been a country where doing something that had never been done before was culturally out of place. Suddenly, that was changing.

Endo would go on to form bands of his own, re-interpreting Japanese through a fresh lens in the same manner that Dylan’s shocking drawl was transmuting the folk stylings of America through the Judas defilement of charged particles. Students all over the country, still reconciling the nuclear destruction of their cities, were stirred into daring cultural action. The sound of the US military’s country-wide radio broadcast was forming the crackly backbeat of a revolution.

A few years prior to Endo’s discovery, Nobuyoshi Araki was undergoing a similar awakening while he was attending film and photography school at Chiba University in 1959. Japan was undergoing a tempestuous period of radical change at the time. Stationed between the old ways and the new, students began to partake in the historical Anpo Protests as the left tried to sway a more neutral path for Japan in the ensuing Cold War, embracing the liberation of the West but with their own identity to uphold the same daring individualism that nearly prompted Endo to turn off the radio when he first heard Dylan.

Araki’s photography was borne from this period of the old violently clashing with the new as his crisp, expressive style blended fine art, eroticism and bondage in something that was unmistakably Japanese and yet not like anything Japan had seen before. It was rock ‘n’ roll photography, and at that time, that carried a profound message, as Paul McCartney said himself of the era in his own photography book 1964: Eyes of the Storm: “Although we had no perspective at the time, we were, like the world, experiencing a sexual awakening. Our parents had fears of sexual diseases and all sorts of things like that, but by the middle of the ’60s, we’d realised that we had a freedom that had never been available to their generation.”

Along that radical journey, Araki captured the transition of his country. “Photography is about a single point of a moment,” he said. “It’s like stopping time. As everything gets condensed in that forced instant. But if you keep creating these points, they form a line which reflects your life.” The radicalism that Araki depicts in his collected moments displays how the culture of Japan rapidly changed in the post-war bohemian boom spurred on by the boldly different bands washing ashore.

Finding creative impetus in the changing society surrounding him, Araki became one of Japan’s most prolific artists and while volume doesn’t always equal quality, Araki went about his splurge in such a daring way that it always proved progressive. His most prominent works relate to erotic portraits of modern Japanese women in a very voyeuristic yet performative gaze. A gaze that is best summed up by his philosophy: “Art is all about doing what you shouldn’t”. Rock ‘n’ roll had already proved that to the youth, as the US radio tactically espoused tales of musician’s daring exploits in the States.

This daring bent to his art somewhat naturally resulted in eroticism. This came from the liberation that Japan was experiencing on this front, as the Taschen publication Araki: Tokyo Lucky Hole, explains: “It started in 1978 with an ordinary coffee shop near Kyoto. Word spread that the waitresses wore no panties under their miniskirts. Similar establishments popped up across the country. Men waited in line outside to pay three times the usual coffee price just to be served by a panty-free young woman.”

Thereafter, an erotic craze swept over Japan as society became increasingly brazen and found new ways to push the boundaries of previously accepted civility. “Within a few years, a new craze took hold: the no-panties ‘massage’ parlour. Increasingly bizarre services followed, from fondling clients through holes in coffins to commuter-train fetishists. One particularly popular destination was a Tokyo club called ‘Lucky Hole’ where clients stood on one side of a plywood partition, a hostess on the other. In between them was a hole big enough for a certain part of the male anatomy.” No prizes for guessing which part.

While this revolution is now the subject of endless sociological study, there can be no finer expression of it than Araki’s dazzling work. As a recent ISA report opined: “In Japan, sexual liberation occurred which means the strict norm bonding marriage and sex became loosened, and the sex media and sexual service industry improved broadly, but sexual revolution didn’t occur.”

In other words, people wanted something new but that wasn’t broadly provided by the mainstream realm. Thus, as the study puts it, “People subjectively project and act to change the situation of sexuality.” A revolution may not have occurred to a wholesale degree, but mindsets had changed, and the Glory Hole establishments almost became the subversive manifestation of this newfound desire.

This subversive force was largely driven by a wave of feminism in Japan. As Setsu Shigematsu opines: “In 1970, a new women’s liberation movement emerged, marking a watershed in the history of feminism in modern Japan… Unlike liberal feminism, which stresses the achievement of equality with men, radical feminism takes a broader view, emphasising women’s oppression under patriarchy as a fundamental form of human oppression that can only be relieved through comprehensive societal and cultural transformation.”

In this regard, Araki’s bold work is an empowering expose of women defying objectification. “Women? They are Gods,” he once said, and as such, he rendered them with a fine art brush even in the gaudy world of gritty urban life. This juxtaposition is a fascinating feat within his work, placing a sense of objectification and normality alongside power and Venus-like interplay.

Now, Taschen have brought this to stunning life with two separate books on his works. The deluxe edition Akari is a stunning collection of 1000 images that Araki defines as “an epitaph for my first 60 years”. Araki: Tokyo Lucky Hole, also featuring over 800 of his finest works. You can explore a selection of the images contained below.

Taschen publication Araki is available here.

Araki’s erotic photography of Japan’s sexual awakening:

Related Topics

Self-publishing a photo book can be a daunting endeavor. In this video from The Photographic Eye, hear from photographers who have self-published with minimal upfront costs and even turned a profit.

If you’d like to know how to self-publish and sell photo books without spending your own money, this video includes an interview with British documentary photographer Edward Thompson.

Thompson is an accomplished British photographer who covers environmental issues among other topics. His resume is impressive, including lecturing and appearances at the prestigious V&A Museum in London.

Over the years, Thompson shot a number of long-term photographic projects, initially without the intention of publishing photo books. It wasn’t until the pandemic hit that he began looking through and cataloging his extensive body of work.

Many publishers require a large upfront lump sum to print a short run of photo books – often out of reach for photographers looking to publish personal projects. Crowdfunding gave Thompson the ability to offer pre-orders for his books without any upfront costs coming out of pocket.

Zines are another self-publishing option without the burden of high costs. Shorter print runs of less than 100 copies can get off the ground for less than £100 – a great way to recoup expenses with a smaller commitment.

The conversation develops interestingly from there, with insight that should have viewers taking notes and finding inspiration to get their own work published.

There’s an impetuous, unpredictable energy to the pictures captured by the late Tish Murtha, the Tyneside documentary photographer who turned her lens on to marginalised communities in the north-east of England. There’s also humour in the shots, and no small degree of anger. And as this engrossing, affectionate film by Paul Sng reveals, there is a great deal of Murtha’s prickly, uncompromising personality reflected in the photographs she took.

A clear kinship is evident between this documentary and Sng’s previous film, Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché, about the X-Ray Spex frontwoman. Both are portraits of trailblazing female artists who struggled to find acceptance; both films also provide a window into wider societal issues. Poly Styrene dealt with racism and sexism in the music industry; Tish confronts class prejudices and unemployment. And both films were made in collaboration with the daughters of their subjects. Tish Murtha’s only child, Ella Murtha, is an engaging guide to her mother’s life and legacy; her openness and candour imbue the film with its considerable emotional impact.