photojournalism

Robert Frank's The Americans and Magnum's "Postcards from America"

Image credit: Postcards from America Tumblr, Mikhael Subotzky

On a recent visit to the Harry Ransom Center’s exhibition "Radical Transformation: Magnum Photos in the Digital Age” I was inspired by how often Magnum photographers turned their lenses to capture that ever elusive “representative” photo collection of the U.S., as they do in their project “Postcards from America.” The concept behind the project is that a group of acclaimed Magnum photographers work collaboratively. In order to do this, they pile into a van and travel to different cities taking snapshots and uploading them directly to their Tumblr: http://postcardsfromamerica.tumblr.com/.

Jim Goldberg's Rich and Poor: The Impoverished Viewer

black and white photo of man, woman, and child. Handwritten text beneath photo says when I look at this picture I feel alone. It makes me want to reach out to Patty and make our relationship work. Cowboy Stanley. 

Image Credit: Magnum Photos

 

 

Jim Goldberg's Rich and Poor features photographs of the impoverished tenants of a San Fransisco hotel and of an affluent group of select individuals, also shown in their homes. As the most obvious dimension of the title suggests, the photos serve as a comparative essay on class and the disparity of wealth in America. Goldberg compiled this collection through the late 70s and early 80s and it was originally published by Random House in 1985. The Harry Ransom Center's current exhibit, Radical Transformation: Magnum Photos into the Digital Age (September 10, 2013 – January 5, 2014), includes several images from Rich and Poor.

 



The Funny Faces of Politics: No Photoshop Required

McCain lurches after Obama

Image Credit: Reuters

As we’re in the middle of another presidential campaign, I thought I’d devote my inaugural viz. post to an aspect of visual political rhetoric: photos capturing politicians with odd facial expression or in odd poses. One of the better known examples of this phenomenon is the above photo of John McCain from the last debate in the 2008 presidential campaign. In the still image, McCain stands behind Barack Obama, seeming to lurch after him while disrespectfully sticking out his tongue and reaching out with his hands. I want to stress “seeming,” though, because viewing McCain’s movement in context offers an alternative explanation.

Soviet Photojournalism and The Thaw

water exploding from the ground

Mikhail Kocharian, Vladimir Kharstyan. Water--A Life. Published in Sovetskoe Foto 11 (November 1964)

Of the numerous culturally fascinating movements that came out of the late 1950s and early 1960s, photography as art became of particular interest to Soviet photojournalists. For those who are less familiar with the history of visual culture in the Soviet Union, photography was removed from artistic institutions in the mid-1930s, and thus garnered very little cultural prestige. In an effort to gain the status of artists, rather than craftsmen, those who worked for the primer photography journal, Sovetskoe Foto (The Soviet Photograph) embarked on a crusade to catapult photography into the socialist realist, or officially recognized, art world.

Cairo and Perspective

Lefteris Pitarakis Via New York Times

Since protests began one week ago across Egypt, the media has published many photographs of iconoclasm against images of President Mubarak, or images depicting the scale of the protests in Cairo.  I'd like to raise the question of how representative images from this week are using one-point and two-point perspective, and how that perspective informs our sense of the unfolding events.

Violence in Images

screen capture of Streetwise

Image credit: screen shot of Harlan County, USA 

Over the past few weeks my students have been discussing several documentary films and a recurrent topic has been the line between an emotional appeal and an exploitative image of the body in pain.  We have considered key scenes in the documentary Harlan County, USA (1976) in which director Barbara Kopple closely trains her camera on a man struggling to breathe through the pain of black lung.  We will also discuss the inclusion of several open-casket shots of a child’s dead body in Martin Bell’s Streetwise (1984).  The ethics of documentarians is a topic I’ve considered before on this site, but this week my student’s surprised me by probing the distinction between images of an actual body in pain and simulated images of a body in pain. 

Don't You Dare Go Digital

 

rudik 1 rudik 2

rudik 3


Rachel’s post this past week about the low-fi appeal of recent music videos raises similar questions to those surrounding a recent controversy over a digitally altered image stripped of its status as a World Press Photo contest winner.  And, what was the alteration that led to this disqualification?  Third prize winner in Sports Features, Stepan Rudik removed a foot from the finished photograph.  World Press Photo, an organization known for promoting professional standards in photojournalism largely through the means of awarding one of the most prestigious photography prizes, disqualified Rudik because the jury discovered that he had digitally altered one of the images in his photo-essay submission. Both the low-fi aesthetics of the OKGO video and the field of professional photojournalism privilege a definition of technical prowess that does not include manipulation of the image beyond much capturing and cropping.  The value of the image and the skill of the image-makers, in both of these respects, reside in the moment the photograph is shot and not at any other point in the process in which the photograph is made. 

 

Google Earth Pedagogies: From Haiti to RHE 306

pre- and post-quake views of the Presidential Palace (top left, top right) and downtown Port au Prince (bottom left, bottom right)

Image Credit: Google Lat Long Blog

If were you watching the news in mid-January, you likely saw images like those above flashing repeatedly across your television or computer screen.  Unlike the photojournalistic, street-level portraits that tend to document disasters, these aerial shots, produced through a collaboration between Google Earth and GeoEye (a satellite imaging company), have been prominent in the visual coverage of the earthquake that hit Haiti on January 12, 2010.   The above images show pre- and post-quake views of the Presidential Palace (top left; top right) and downtown Port au Prince (bottom left; bottom right), and were created using the timeline tool in Google Earth.

Archives and Associated Press

Screen shot of AP images

Image credit: Screen shot of APimages.com

A recent development in Shepard Fairey's ongoing legal battle with the Associated Press sent me thinking through some of the issues surrounding large private, not-for-profit, and commercial archives of stock photography and photojournalism.  Last year, the AP claimed that Fairey violated copyright laws when he based his "Hope" poster for the Obama campaign on one of their photographs.  Fairey countered that he was protected under fair use, but his situation suffered a setback last week when he admitted to knowingly submitting as evidence images that were different than those under consideration in the trial.  While this case raises several interesting questions about the doctrine of fair use and visual allusion, I am also curious about the extent of influence the Associated Press has on our daily interactions with visual images.  How does this massive news agency--with over 10 million images in its library--shape our access to and understanding of contemporary photojournalism?

 

Documentary Photography and the Caption

image of hand, police line tape

Image Credit: Rolex Dela Pena, European Press Photo Agency

H/T: Lens, The New York Times

While scrolling through the Lens photojournalism blog this morning I came across this photograph of a the hand of a dead body partially obscured by caution tape.  The photographed victim was one of over forty people killed in violence following the election on Monday in the Philippines--many of the people kidnapped and killed were lawyers, journalists, and relatives of a local politician.  What struck me most about this image was its relationship to text; both within the photograph and beneath it in the caption.  Across the image the photographer has captured the text of the caution tape "Police Line Do Not Cross."  It seems, however, that the photographer and the viewer disregard this warning by visually transgressing past the barrier and the victim's hand disregards this warning by physically transgressing beyond the tape.  It is the textual warning on the tape that contributes to a sense of action within the image--agency on the part of the victim and the intrusion on the part of the viewer/photographer.

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