TITLE: Schaefer, Washington
REPRODUCTION NUMBER: LC-DIG-ggbain-09131 (digital file from original neg.)
No known restrictions on publication.
SUMMARY: Photo shows Herman A. "Germany" Schaefer (1877-1919),
one of the most entertaining characters in baseball history, trying out the other side of the camera
during the Washington Senators visit to play the New York Highlanders in
April, 1911.
Germany Schaefer, a versatile infielder and quick baserunner,
played most of his career with the Detroit Tigers and the Washington Senators.
MEDIUM: 1 negative : glass ; 5 x 7 in. or smaller.


CREATED/PUBLISHED: [1911]
Digital ID: ggbain 09131 Source: digital file from original neg.
Reproduction Number: LC-DIG-ggbain-09131 (digital file from original neg.)
Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA
http://memory.loc.gov/service/pnp/ggbain/09100/09131v.jpg
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/h?pp/PPALL:@field(NUMBER+@1(ggbain+09131))
Conversion TIFF > JPEG: Anglonautes
Mots clés : Anglonautes > Images > photos

Picture this… producing their own images of everyday items,
which they flash up on the whiteboard, has allowed students learning English at City and Islington college to make rapid progress Vicki Couchman

Off-the-shelf is not the only option
Commercial and free virtual learning environments are gaining in popularity. But, as City and Islington college in
London is proving, it is also possible to go it alone for a modest investment, says Stephen Hoare

The Guardian        Educ@guardian        p. 9

Tuesday March 7, 2006
http://education.guardian.co.uk/elearning/story/0,,1724612,00.html

Mots clés : Anglonautes > Images > photos

Robert Mapplethorpe. Self-Portrait, 1988.
Gelatin-silver print, 26 5/8 x 22 1/2 inches. Artist’s Proof 1/1.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Gift, The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. 93.4305.
© The Estate of Robert Mapplethorpe.
http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_work_lg_97A_3.html
Mots clés : Anglonautes > Images > photos

Andy Warhol        American        1979
Polaroid Polacolor print
32 ¹/₄ x 22 in.
98.XM.5.1
© The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
http://www.getty.edu/art/collections/objects/oz114421.html
http://www.getty.edu/art/collections/objects/o114421.html
Mots clés : Anglonautes > Images > photos

Bill Viola        The Passions        2003
http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/viola/
http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/exhibitions/bill_viola/default.htm
Mots clés : Anglonautes > Images > photos
 

Alice Liddell as The Beggar Maid (circa 1859),
a Albumen silver print from a glass negative by Lewis Carroll.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Met Museum Acquires Gilman Trove of Photos
New York Times, Randy Kennedy, Published: March 17, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/17/arts/design/17gilm.html?hp
Mots clés : Anglonautes > Images > photos
 

Eddie Adams        1933-2004
Viet Cong, Saigon, 1968
http://www.creighton.edu/~kpc01100/adamssite/photos.html
Mots clés : Anglonautes > Images > photos
 

Diane Arbus
Two ladies at the automat, N.Y.C. 1966
Copyright © 1980 The Estate of Diane Arbus, LLC
The Metropolitan Museum of Art        Copié 20.3.2005
http://www.metmuseum.org/special/Arbus/l.asp?img=1
Mots clés : Anglonautes > Images > photos
 

Walker Evans (American, 1903–1975)
New York [Subway Passengers, New York], 1938
Gelatin silver print; 12.2 x 18.4 cm (4 13/16 x 7 1/4 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987 (1987.1100.472)
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art        Copié 20.3.2005
http://www.metmuseum.org/special/Few_Are_Chosen/1.L.htm
Mots clés : Anglonautes > Images > photos
 

Ronald Fischer, beekeeper, Davis, California, May 9, 1981
Richard Avedon (American, b. 1923)
Gelatin silver print; 151.4 x 119.7 cm (59 5/8 x 47 1/8 in.)
Collection of the artist © Richard Avedon
http://www.metmuseum.org/special/Richard_Avedon/7.r.htm
Mots clés : Anglonautes > Images > photos
 

camera
http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artMakerDetails?maker=2026
http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/cameron/

lens

photography
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/photography

International Center of Photography
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/i/international_center_of_photography/index.html?inline=nyt-org

digital photography        2009
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/
digital-photography-has-it-become-an-obsession-1606148.html

travel photography
http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/photography

image

abiding image
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/feb/24/miners-strike-photo-don-mcphee

pixel
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/
digital-photography-has-it-become-an-obsession-1606148.html

photography books        2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/sep/25/stephen.shore.photography

Victoria & Albert Museum > Exploring photography
http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/photography/index.php

The Boston Globe > The Big Picture > News stories in photographs
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/

The Press Photographer's Year 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/gallery/2008/jun/06/photography1?picture=334652249

Pick of the pics 2008: David Levene
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/interactive/2008/dec/31/david-levene-2008

Pick of the pics 2008: Sean Smith
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/interactive/2008/dec/22/sean-smith-best-2008

A Long Exposure: 100 years of Guardian photography
The exhibition includes striking work taken
since the paper appointed its first staff photographer, Walter Doughty, in 1908.
A Long Exposure: 100 Years of Guardian Photography
runs until March 1 2009 at The Lowry in Salford, Greater Manchester
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/interactive/2008/oct/21/theguardian-pressandpublishing
 

Tate Britain's 'How We Are'
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,,2065853,00.html
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/gallery/2007/apr/26/photography?picture=329794527

Library of Congress > The Carl Van Vechten Photographs Collection        1932-1964
Creative Americans > 1,395 photographs taken by American photographer
Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964) between 1932 and 1964
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/vvhtml/vvhome.html

Library of Congress > The Chicago Daily News > Photographs        USA        1902-1933
This collection comprises over 55,000 images of urban life
captured on glass plate negatives between 1902 and 1933
by photographers employed by the Chicago Daily News, then one of Chicago's leading newspapers.
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpcoop/ichihtml/cdnhome.html

Library of Congress > Working in Paterson: Occupational Heritage in an Urban Setting
presents 470 interview excerpts and 3882 photographs
from the Working in Paterson Folklife Project of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.
The four-month study of occupational culture in Paterson, New Jersey, was conducted in 1994.
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/wiphtml/pthome.html

Library of Congress > Famous People
Selected Portraits From the Collections  of the Library of Congress
http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/list/235_intr.html

Library of Congress > The George Grantham Bain Collection
represents the photographic files of one of America's earliest news picture agencies.
The collection richly documents sports events, theater,
celebrities, crime, strikes, disasters, political activities
including the woman suffrage campaign, conventions and public celebrations.
The photographs Bain produced and gathered for distribution
through his news service were worldwide in their coverage,
but there was a special emphasis on life in New York City.
The bulk of the collection dates from the 1900s to the mid-1920s,
but scattered images can be found as early as the 1860s and as late as the 1930s.
Available online are 39,744 glass negatives
and a selection of about 1,600 photographic prints for which copy negatives exist.
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pp/ggbainhtml/ggbainabt.html
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pp/ggbainhtml/ggbaintips.html
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pp/ggbainquery.html
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/f?ils:0:./temp/~pp_ncAb:

Library of Congress > The Robert Runyon Photograph Collection of the South Texas Border Area
a collection of over 8,000 items
unique visual resource documenting the Lower Rio Grande Valley during the early 1900s
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award97/txuhtml/runyhome.html

Documenting America > Photographic series / FSA - OWI photos
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsahtml/fadocamer.html

Library of Congress > Panoramic Photographs > Taking the Long View        1851-1991
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/panoramic_photo/

Upskirting
is the term used to describe taking photographs,
often on a mobile-phone camera, up an unsuspecting woman's skirt
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/feb/25/women-upskirting

photographic archives        USA
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/archive/programs/shootingthepast/archives_feature/loc.html

The First Photograph is a one-of-a-kind permanent positive-image process,
secured upon the surface of a pewter plate in 1826        USA
http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/permanent/wfp/2.html

heliograph

photography > digital / silver-gelatin process
http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5466822

Photographs and Graphic Works in the National Archives        USA
http://www.archives.gov/research/formats/photos.html

daguerreotype > The Library of Congress collection        USA
The Library's daguerreotype collection consists of more than 725 photographs dating from 1839 to 1864. Portrait daguerreotypes produced by the Mathew Brady studio make up the major portion of the collection. The collection also includes early architectural views by John Plumbe, several Philadelphia street scenes,
early portraits by pioneering daguerreotypist Robert Cornelius,
studio portraits by black photographers James P. Ball and Francis Grice, and copies of painted portraits.
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/daghtml/daghome.html
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/daghtml/dagport.html

tintype

wet-plate collodion process
http://www.collodion.org/

documentary photography
http://library.duke.edu/specialcollections/collections/photography.html#digital
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,956717,00.html

documentary photographer > Kris Allan
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/gallery/2008/sep/29/mentalhealth.photography?picture=337704203

Gilman Paper Company Collection of photographs
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/17/arts/design/17gilm.html?hp

William Henry Fox Talbot        1800-1877
http://www.foxtalbot.arts.gla.ac.uk/default.htm
http://www.masters-of-photography.com/T/talbot/talbot.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/talbot_william_henry_fox.shtml

photo studio
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/news/story/0,11711,1298090,00.html

The demise of Polaroid’s instant film cameras
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/weekinreview/28kimmelman.html
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/12/28/weekinreview/1228_POLAROID_SS_index.html

Library of Congress > Prints and photographs        USA
http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/

Famous People
Selected Portraits From the Collections of the Library of Congress        USA
http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/list/235_intr.html

Library of Congress > Carol M. Highsmith Archive        USA        1980-2005
The online presentation of the Carol M. Highsmith Archive
features photographs of landmark buildings and architectural renovation projects in Washington, D.C., and throughout the United States. The first 23 groups of photographs contain more than 2,500 images and date from 1980 to 2005, with many views in color as well as black-and-white.
Extensive coverage of the Library of Congress Jefferson Building was added in 2007.
The archive is expected to grow to more than 100,000 photographs covering all of the United States.

Highsmith, a distinguished and richly published American photographer, has donated her work to the Library of Congress since 1992. Starting in 2002, Highsmith provided scans with new donations to allow rapid online access throughout the world. Her generosity in dedicating the rights to the American people for copyright free access also makes this Archive a very special visual resource.
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pp/highsmhtml/highsmabt.html
 

Library of Congress > U.S. News and World Report Magazine Photograph Collection        USA        1952-1986
The collection consists of almost 1.2 million original 35mm and 2 1/4 inch negatives (primarily black & white)
and 45,000 contact sheets donated by the U.S. News & World Report, Inc.
The collection is primarily photographs
taken by staff of the U.S. News & World Report Magazine between 1952 and 1986
http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/coll/129_usn.html

The Carl Van Vechten Photographs Collection at the Library of Congress
consists of 1,395 photographs taken by American photographer Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964)
between 1932 and 1964.
The bulk of the collection consists of portrait photographs of celebrities,
including many figures from the Harlem Renaissance.
A much smaller portion of the collection is an assortment of American landscapes        USA
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pp/vanhtml/vanabt.html

widelux views of an Arkansas prison farm        Bruce Jackson        USA        1975
http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/showcase-a-wide-view-of-a-hellish-world/?hp

Picturing the Century: One Hundred Years of Photography from the National Archives        USA
http://www.archives.gov/press/press-kits/1930-census-photos/
http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/picturing_the_century/galleries/greatwar.html

The National Museum of Photography, Film & Television
http://www.nmpft.org.uk/

How we are > Photographing Britain > photographic heritage        2007
The first major exhibition of photography ever to be held at Tate Britain.
It takes a unique look at the journey of British photography,
from the pioneers of the early medium to today’s photographers
who use new technology to make and display their imagery.
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/howweare/default.shtm
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/photography/story/0,,2083001,00.html
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/gallery/2007/apr/26/photography?picture=329794527

Don McPhee        1945-2007

Orgreave, 1984

The police and NUM strikers clash at Orgreave coking plant, near Sheffi eld, during the miner’s strike

The Guardian        pp. 22-23        23.3.2007

Mots clés : Anglonautes > Images > photos

Cette photographie a été republiée dans le Guardian du 24 février 2009, p. 14,
avec la légende suivante :

Paul Castle (above, far left) and George ‘Geordie’ Brealey (above, right) at Orgreave in 1984.
http://digital.guardian.co.uk/guardian/2009/02/24/pdfs/gdn_090224_gtw_14_21993003.pdf
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/feb/24/miners-strike-photo-don-mcphee
 

photograph        FA

photographer
http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/cameron/
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/cruelandtender/parr.htm#images
http://www.nmpft.org.uk/

Guardian photographer > Martin Argles
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/interactive/2008/dec/29/martin-argles-best-2008

photographic

shot
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/nov/20/best-shot-bruce-gilden

snapshot
http://www.usatoday.com/travel/destinations/2007-10-21-snapshots_N.htm

snap
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/technology/13novel.html

iconic
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1891360

photojournalist
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,895618,00.html

photojournalism > New York Times >
One in 8 Million tells the stories of New York characters in sounds and images
Photographs by Todd Heisler        USA
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/nyregion/1-in-8-million/index.html#/rivka_karasik

New York Times > Lens > Photography, Video and Photojournalism        USA
http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/

photography > New York Times > Assistant Managing Editor Michele McNally        USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/22/business/media/22askthetimes.html?pagewanted=all

on assignment for The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/07/25/world/middleeast/20080726_CENSOR2_6.html

be embedded / disembedded
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/07/25/world/middleeast/20080726_CENSOR2_5.html

War photographer > Chris Hondros
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9118474

War photographer > The Diary of a Shooter > The Documentary Photography of Zoriah Miller
http://www.diariesofashooter.com/stories.html
http://zoriah.com/archivemainpage.html
http://www.zoriah.net/blog/suicide-bombing-in-anbar-.html

Rankin
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/feb/13/photograph-rankin
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2009/feb/12/rankin-live-preview-photographs?picture=343092054

Ray Mortenson
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/01/arts/design/01brok.html?hp

George Plemper's photographic record of south London working-class life        1970s
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/interactive/2008/jun/04/george.plemper.audio.slideshow
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/gallery/2008/may/14/communities?picture=334075059
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/may/14/communities.society
http://www.flickr.com/photos/7718785@N06/sets/72157600401357917/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/7718785@N06/

William Eggleston
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/07/arts/design/07eggl.html
http://whitney.org/www/exhibition/eggleston.jsp

Don McCullin
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6307730.ece
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2009/may/12/don-mccullin-photography-exhibition?picture=347244476
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/photography/story/0,,2045217,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,895618,00.html
http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/photography/photographerframe.php?photographerid=ph041
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/picture_gallery/04/health_0life_interrupted0_by_don_mccullin/html/1.stm
http://www.horvatland.com/pages/entrevues/06-mccullin-en_en.htm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/johntusainterview/mccullin_transcript.shtml

Douglas Hannaford Jeffery, theatre photographer        1917-2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/feb/14/douglas-h-jeffery-obituary

William James Claxton        1927-2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/oct/13/william-claxton-photographer-chet-baker
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/oct/17/jazz-photography
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/oct/15/jazz
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2008/oct/15/photography-art?picture=338596323
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/14/arts/design/14claxton.html
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95827792
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/14/AR2008101402824_pf.html

Cornell Capa        1918-2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/24/arts/design/23cnd-capa.html?hp

Don McPhee > photographer / photojournalist        1945-2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/feb/24/miners-strike-photo-don-mcphee
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/gallery/2008/apr/17/photography?picture=333600793
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/news/obituary/0,,2043731,00.html
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/danchung/2007/03/27/don_mcphee_19452007.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/slideshow/page/0,,2043336,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/gall/0,8542,1384820,00.html
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/pictures/0,8542,1385621,00.html
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/gall/0,,803674,00.html
http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,,2046393,00.html

Leonard Freed        1929-2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1964890,00.html

Joseph John Rosenthal        1911-2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1856122,00.html
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAProsenthal.htm
http://www.newseum.org/warstories/interviews/mov/journalists/bio.asp?ID=32
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Rosenthal

Photographer / photojournalist / painter > Humphrey Spender        1910-2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/gallery/2008/mar/28/bolton.worktown?picture=333235760
http://spender.boltonmuseums.org.uk/history_humphrey_spender.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2005/mar/15/guardianobituaries.artsobituaries1
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/humphrey-spender-528311.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article427699.ece
http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?cgroupid=999999961&artistid=1978&page=1
http://www.jameslomax.com/words/1045/mass-observation-and-humphrey-spender

Walker Evans        1903-1975
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/today/jul16.html
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsahtml/fachap04.html

Yousuf Karsh        1908-2002
http://cybermuse.gallery.ca/cybermuse/search/artist_work_e.jsp?iartistid=2833
http://www.geh.org/ne/mismi3/karsh_sld00001.html

Humphrey Spender        1910-2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1437719,00.html

Photographer Alan Villiers (1903-1982 )chronicles the last days of merchant sailing
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/gallery/2009/mar/18/alan-villiers-sailing-ships-photography?picture=344763272
http://www.nmm.ac.uk/explore/sea-and-ships/facts/ships-and-seafarers/the-photography-of-alan-villiers

Elizabeth 'Lee' Miller        1907-1977
http://www.leemiller.co.uk/main.aspx
http://www.npg.org.uk/live/womiller.asp
http://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/future_exhibs/lee_miller/index.html
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/video/2007/sep/15/lee.miller
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/news/story/0,,2063349,00.html
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,,1395851,00.html
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,,818289,00.html
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/pictures/0,,820967,00.html

Alfred Stieglitz        1864-1946
http://www.getty.edu/art/collections/bio/a1851-1.html
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/stieglitz_a.html

Jerome Liebling
http://www.jeromeliebling.com/

Jane Bown
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,,2173226,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/observer/gallery/2007/sep/20/photography?picture=330783874
http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,,1721601,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/newsroom/story/0,11718,1072170,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/newsroom/story/0,11718,1030370,00.html

Alastair Thain
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1680908,00.html
http://www.alastairthain.com/Index_content.html
http://www.npg.org.uk/live/search/person.asp?LinkID=mp07788&role=art

Nan Goldin
http://fototapeta.art.pl/2003/ngie.php

Martin Parr
http://www.martinparr.com/
http://www.magnumphotos.com/c/htm/TreePf_MAG.aspx?
Stat=Photographers_Portfolio&E=29YL53UHBZX

Christopher Morris
http://pdngallery.com/legends/menu.html

Carl Mydans
http://www.digitaljournalist.org/issue9802/mydanscover.htm
http://www.gallerym.com/artist.cfm?ID=30
http://www.temple.edu/photo/photographers/mydans/mydans.html

Irving Penn
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/07/arts/design/07gett.html
http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/penninfo.shtm

Bill Brandt        1904-1983
http://www.billbrandt.com/
http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/1232_brandt/
http://www.npg.org.uk/live/brandt.asp
http://www.robertkleingallery.com/gallery/album13
http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3246,36-698940@51-695010,0.html

Weegee        1899-1968
http://www.icp.org/weegee/
http://www.masters-of-photography.com/W/weegee/weegee.html
http://www.cosmopolis.ch/english/cosmozero/weegee.htm

W. Eugene Smith        1918-1978
http://www.masters-of-photography.com/S/smith/smith.html
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/smith_w.html

David Bailey
http://www.davidbaileyphotography.com/

David Goldblatt > Photographs from South Africa
http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/1998/goldblatt/

Eddie Adams        1933-2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1309850,00.html
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=3926127

Lewis Wickes Hine's "Work Portraits"
http://www.nypl.org/research/chss/spe/art/photo/hinex/workport/work1.html

Robert Frank
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1336063,00.html
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/frank/

Berenice Abbott        1898-1991
http://www.nypl.org/research/chss/spe/art/photo/abbottex/abbott.html

Anne Noggle        1922-2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/news/obituary/0,12723,1569361,00.htm

Richard Avedon        1923-2004
http://www.richardavedon.com/menu.php
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/fashion/14AVEDON.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1648674,00.html
http://www.temple.edu/photo/photographers/avedon/Avedon.html
http://www.metmuseum.org/special/se_event.asp?
OccurrenceId=%7B36C7411F-EEF8-11D5-9414-00902786BF44%7D
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/avedon_r.html
http://pdngallery.com/legends/legends9/
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?041011fa_fact2
http://www.liberation.com/page.php?Article=242940
http://www.iht.com/articles/541691.html
http://slate.msn.com/id/64567/

Boy with hearing aid.
Collection: William Gedney Photographs and Writings
Type: Photographs
Box Number: 66
Negative Number: Not Indicated
Exposure: ca. 1960
Year: ca. 1960
Print: Unknown
Photographer: Gedney, William Gale, 1932-1989
Mark: Stamp
Subject: St. Joseph's School for the Deaf
Item Number: SJ0007
Duke University
http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/gedney.SJ0007/
http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/gedney/

William Gedney        1932-1989

Duke Libraries > Digital Collections
From the mid 1950s through the early 1980s,
William Gedney photographed throughout the United States, in India, and in Europe.
From street scenes outside his Brooklyn apartment to the daily chores of unemployed coal miners,
from the indolent lifestyle of hippies in Haight-Ashbury to the sacred rituals of Hindu worshippers,
Gedney recorded the lives of others with remarkable clarity and poignancy.
http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/gedney/

The UCLA Digital Library Program (DLP)
serves as the catalyst for the creation, management, and delivery of digital content
in support of the UCLA Library mission and goals. The Program provides for the storage and dissemination
of digital objects, including text, images, audio, and video in their various digital manifestations and combinations. The UCLA Library provides a web presence for digital collections, and provides storage, backup and digital preservation support for all digital content accepted into, or developed by, the Library.
http://www2.library.ucla.edu/libraries/digital.cfm

Diane Arbus        1923-1971
http://www.metmuseum.org/special/se_event.asp?OccurrenceId=
{E9C11548-26E7-431C-9F83-03E1EBC758CD}&HomePageLink=special_c2b


 

Hugh Mangum photographs: N229
Collection: Hugh Mangum Photographs, (ca. 1890)-1922
Type: Negatives (photographic)
Photographs
Portraits
Negative Number: N229
Creator: Mangum, Hugh, 1877-1922
Format: Dry collodion negatives
Subject: Black
Commercial portraiture
Indoor
Man
Portrait photography -- North Carolina
Portrait photography -- Virginia
White
Woman
Item Number: hmpgp09229
Duke University
http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/hmp.hmpgp09229/
Mots clés : Anglonautes > Images > photos
 

Hugh Mangum photographs: N314
Collection: Hugh Mangum Photographs, (ca. 1890)-1922
Type: Negatives (photographic)
Photographs
Portraits
Negative Number: N314
Creator: Mangum, Hugh, 1877-1922
Format: Dry collodion negatives
Subject: Commercial portraiture
Indoor
Man, Woman, Girls
Portrait photography -- North Carolina
Portrait photography -- Virginia
White
Item Number: hmpgp12314
Duke University
http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/hmp.hmpgp12314/
Mots clés : Anglonautes > Images > photos
 

Hugh Mangum photographs: N283
Collection: Hugh Mangum Photographs, (ca. 1890)-1922
Type: Negatives (photographic)
Photographs
Portraits
Negative Number: N283
Creator: Mangum, Hugh, 1877-1922
Format: Dry collodion negatives
Subject: Commercial portraiture
Indoor
Men, Women
Portrait photography -- North Carolina
Portrait photography -- Virginia
White
Item Number: hmpgp01283
Duke University
http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/hmp.hmpgp01283/
Mots clés : Anglonautes > Images > photos
 

Hugh Mangum        ca. 1890-1922

Duke Libraries > Digital Collections
Hundreds of portraits made by an itinerant photographer
who rode the trains to the small towns of North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia
http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/hmp/

Julia Margaret Cameron        1815-1879
http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artMakerDetails?maker=2026
 

Images, the Law and War

May 17, 2009
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON — It was a hypothetical question in a Supreme Court argument, and it was posed almost 40 years ago. But it managed to anticipate and in some ways to answer President Obama’s argument for withholding photographs showing the abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.

What if, Justice Potter Stewart asked a lawyer for The New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case in 1971, a disclosure of sensitive information in wartime “would result in the sentencing to death of 100 young men whose only offense had been that they were 19 years old and had low draft numbers?” The Times’s lawyer, Alexander M. Bickel, tried to duck the question, but the justice pressed him:

“You would say that the Constitution requires that it be published and that these men die?”

Mr. Bickel yielded, to the consternation of allies in the case. “I’m afraid,” he said, “that my inclinations of humanity overcome the somewhat more abstract devotion to the First Amendment.”

And there it was: an issue as old as democracy in wartime, and as fresh as the latest dispute over pictures showing abuse of prisoners in the 21st century. How much potential harm justifies suppressing facts, whether from My Lai or Iraq, that might help the public judge the way a war is waged in its name?

The exchange also contained more than a hint of the court’s eventual calculus: The asserted harm can’t be vague or speculative; it must be immediate and concrete. It must be the sort of cost that gives a First Amendment lawyer pause.

As it happened, Mr. Bickel’s response outraged the American Civil Liberties Union and other allies of the newspaper in the Pentagon Papers case, which concerned the Nixon administration’s attempt to prevent publication of a secret history of the Vietnam War. They disavowed Mr. Bickel’s answer and said the correct response was, “painfully but simply,” that free people are entitled to evaluate evidence concerning the government’s conduct for themselves.

Which is a good summary of the interest on the other side: Scrutiny of abuses by the government enhances democracy because it promotes accountability and prompts reform.

Justice William O. Douglas, in a 1972 dissent in a case about Congressional immunity, described his view of the basic dynamic. “As has been revealed by such exposés as the Pentagon Papers, the My Lai massacres, the Gulf of Tonkin ‘incident,’ and the Bay of Pigs invasion,” he wrote, “the government usually suppresses damaging news but highlights favorable news.”

Indeed, the Nixon administration successfully opposed the use of the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the release of documents and photographs concerning the killings of hundreds of South Vietnamese civilians in 1968 at My Lai. (The decision led Congress to broaden that law.)

Disclosure of abuses can also provoke a backlash. The indelible images that emerged from the Vietnam War helped turn the nation against the war, and may have steeled America’s enemies. And earlier photographs of abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were used for propaganda and recruitment by insurgents there.

How, then, to apply the lessons of history and law to the possible disclosure of additional images of prisoner mistreatment by Americans in the current wars?

On Wednesday, when Mr. Obama announced that the government was withdrawing from an agreement to comply with court orders requiring release of the images, he said there was little to learn from them and much to fear. But he offered speculation on both sides of the balance.

“The publication of these photos would not add any additional benefit to our understanding of what was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals,” he said. “In fact, the most direct consequence of releasing them, I believe, would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger.”

The first assertion, which the Bush administration also made, is not universally accepted. In a 2005 decision ordering the release of the images, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of the Federal District Court in Manhattan said they may provide insights into whether the abuses shown were indeed isolated and unauthorized.

And the claim that harm would follow disclosure — that terrorists, for example, would exact revenge — is hard to measure or prove. “The terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan do not need pretexts for their barbarism,” Judge Hellerstein wrote. In the Pentagon Papers case, too, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of publication, saying, in essence, that speculation about potential harm was not sufficient.

There are, of course, profound differences between the two cases. One concerned the constitutionality of a prior restraint against publishing information already in the hands of the press; the other is about whether civil rights groups are entitled to obtain materials under the Freedom of Information Act. But both involve contentions that serious harm would follow from publication.

Justice Stewart’s answer, in his concurrence in the 6-to-3 decision, was that assertions are not enough. “I cannot say,” he wrote, that disclosure “will surely result in direct, immediate and irreparable damage to our nation or its people.” In other contexts, too, the Supreme Court has endorsed limits on speech only when it would cause immediate and almost certain harm to identifiable people. More general and diffuse consequences have not done the trick.

In 1949, for instance, the court overturned the disorderly conduct conviction of a Chicago priest whose anti-Semitic speech at a rally had provoked a hostile crowd to riot. Free speech, Justice Douglas wrote, “may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are or even stirs people to anger.”

Fear of violence, however, was enough to persuade many people that publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad should be discouraged or forbidden.

Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor who has handled terrorism cases, said the only prudent course in the current case is to withhold the images. “If you’re in a war that’s been authorized by Congress, it should be an imperative to win the war,” he said. “If you have photos that could harm the war effort, you should delay release of the photos.”

But Jameel Jaffer, a lawyer with the civil liberties union, said history favored disclosure, citing the 2004 photographs from Abu Ghraib and the 1991 video of police beating Rodney King in Los Angeles.

But the touchstone remains the Pentagon papers case. It not only framed the issues, but also created a real-world experiment in consequences.

The government had argued, in general terms, that publication of the papers would cost American soldiers their lives. The papers were published. What happened?

David Rudenstine, the dean of the Cardozo Law School and author of “The Day the Presses Stopped,” a history of the case, said he investigated the aftermath with an open mind.

“I couldn’t find any evidence whatsoever from any responsible government official,” he said, “that there was any harm.”

    Images, the Law and War, NYT, 17.5.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/weekinreview/17liptak.html?ref=opinion

Helen Levitt, Who Froze New York Street Life on Film, Is Dead at 95

March 30, 2009
The New York Times
By MARGARETT LOKE

Helen Levitt, a major photographer of the 20th century who caught fleeting moments of surpassing lyricism, mystery and quiet drama on the streets of her native New York, died in her sleep at her home in Manhattan on Sunday. She was 95.

Her death was confirmed by her brother, Bill Levitt, of Alta, Utah.

Ms. Levitt captured instances of a cinematic and delightfully guileless form of street choreography that held at its heart, as William Butler Yeats put it, “the ceremony of innocence.” A man handles garbage-can lids like an exuberant child imitating a master juggler. Even an inanimate object — a broken record — appears to skip and dance on an empty street as a child might, observed by a group of women’s dresses in a shop window.

As marvelous as these images are, the masterpieces in Ms. Levitt’s oeuvre are her photographs of children living their zesty, improvised lives. A white girl and a black boy twirl in a dance of their own imagining. Four girls on a sidewalk turning to stare at five floating bubbles become contrapuntal musical notes in a lovely minor key.

In Ms. Levitt’s best-known picture, three properly dressed children prepare to go trick-or-treating on Halloween 1939. Standing on the stoop outside their house, they are in almost metaphorical stages of readiness. The girl on the top step is putting on her mask; a boy near her, his mask in place, takes a graceful step down, while another boy, also masked, lounges on a lower step, coolly surveying the world.

“At the peak of Helen’s form,” John Szarkowski, former director of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art, once said, “there was no one better.”

The late 1930s and early ’40s, when Ms. Levitt created an astonishing body of work, was a time when many noted photographers produced stark images to inspire social change. Ms. Levitt also took her camera to the city’s poorer neighborhoods, like Spanish Harlem and the Lower East Side, where people treated their streets as their living rooms and where she showed an unerring instinct for a street drama’s perfect pitch. In his 1999 biography of Walker Evans, James R. Mellow wrote that the only photographers Evans “felt had something original to say were Cartier-Bresson, Helen Levitt and himself.”

Helen Levitt was born on Aug. 31, 1913, in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Her father, Sam, a Russian-Jewish immigrant, ran a successful wholesale knit-goods business; her mother, May, was a bookkeeper before her marriage.

Finding high school unstimulating, Ms. Levitt dropped out during her senior year. In a 2002 interview with The New York Times in her fourth-floor walk-up near Union Square, she said that as a young woman she had wanted to do something in the arts though she could not draw well.

Her mother knew the family of J. Florian Mitchell, a commercial portrait photographer in the Bronx, and in 1931 Ms. Levitt began to work for him. “I helped in darkroom printing and developing,” she said. “My salary was six bucks a week.”

With a used Voigtländer camera, she photographed her mother’s friends. Through publications and exhibitions, she knew the documentary work of members of the Film and Photo League and of Cartier-Bresson, Evans and Ben Shahn.

In 1935 she met Cartier-Bresson when he spent a year in New York. On one occasion she accompanied him when he photographed along the Brooklyn waterfront. She also trained her eye, she said, by going to museums and art galleries. “I looked at paintings for composition,” she said. In 1936, she bought a secondhand Leica, the camera Cartier-Bresson favored.

Two years later, she contacted Evans to show him the photographs she had taken of children playing in the streets and their buoyantly unrestrained chalk graffiti. “I went to see him,” she recalled, “the way kids do, and got to be friends with him.” She helped Evans make prints for his exhibition and book “American Photographs.”

Both the quintessentially French Cartier-Bresson and the essentially American Evans influenced Ms. Levitt. Cartier-Bresson had a gift for catching everyday life in graceful, seemingly transparent flux; Evans had a way of being sparingly, frontally direct with his commonplace subjects. Ms. Levitt credited Shahn, whom she had met through Evans, with being a greater influence than Evans. Photographs Shahn took of life on New York sidewalks in the ’30s have an unmediated, gritty spontaneity.

James Agee, a good friend, was also a major influence. She had met him through Evans, who noted, “Levitt’s work was one of James Agee’s great loves, and, in turn, Agee’s own magnificent eye was part of her early training.”

The kind of pictures Ms. Levitt took demanded a photojournalist’s hair-trigger reflexes. But photojournalism didn’t interest her. She was too shy, she said, and lacked the technical proficiency that is a must for any practicing photojournalist. “I was a lousy technician,” she said. “That part bored me.”

Fortune magazine was the first to publish Ms. Levitt’s work, in its July 1939 issue on New York City. The next year her Halloween picture was included in the inaugural exhibition of the Museum of Modern Art’s photography department. In 1943 she had her first solo show at the Modern.

To support herself, Ms. Levitt worked as a film editor. Her friend Janice Loeb, a painter, introduced her to Luis Buñuel, who hired her in the early ’40s to edit his pro-American propaganda films. By 1949, and for the next decade, Ms. Levitt was a full-time film editor and director.

With her friends Agee, who was also a film critic, and Ms. Loeb, she started filming “In the Street” in the mid-’40s. Ms. Loeb was financially well off and was for a time married to Bill Levitt. Mr. Levitt survives his sister, as do several nieces and nephews.

“In the Street,” released in 1952, is the way one imagines Ms. Levitt’s photographs would look if they were to spring to life. The 14-minute documentary of Spanish Harlem, with a piano playing on the soundtrack, is antic, droll, artless and dear.

When Ms. Levitt returned to still photography in 1959, it was to work in color; she was among the first notable photographers to do so. She was helped in this project by Guggenheim fellowships that she received in 1959 and 1960. But much of this early color work was lost when her apartment was burglarized in the late ’60s. In the ’90s she gave up color, she said. She had to go to special labs to get prints made, and the colors weren’t always what she wanted.

Intensely private, Ms. Levitt shunned the limelight and seldom gave interviews. Comprehensive surveys of her career were held at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York in 1980 and at the Laurence Miller Gallery in 1987. But she remained little known to the general public even as late as 1991, when the first national retrospective of her work was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and traveled to major museums.

From the 1930s through the 1990s, Ms. Levitt permitted the publication of only a few books of her images, among them “A Way of Seeing” (Duke University Press, 1965), which includes an essay by Agee; “In the Street: Chalk Drawings and Messages, New York City, 1938-48” (Duke University Press, 1987); and “Mexico City” (Norton, 1997), revisiting her one trip abroad.

Recently, though, PowerHouse Books has published several volumes of her work: “Crosstown” (2001); “Here and There” (2004), black-and-white work not previously published; “Slide Show” (2005), showcasing her color work; and “Helen Levitt” (2008).

Ms. Levitt stopped making her own black and white prints in the 1990s, she said, because of sciatica, which prevented her from standing for long. The sciatica also made carrying the heavy Leica difficult, and in recent years she used a small automatic Contax. She had other health problems. Her lungs were scarred by a near-fatal bout of pneumonia in the 1940s or ’50s, she said. And she was born with Meniere’s syndrome, an inner-ear disorder. “I have felt wobbly all my life,” she said.

Changes in neighborhood life also affected her work. “I go where there’s a lot of activity,” she said. “Children used to be outside. Now the streets are empty. People are indoors looking at television or something.”

Despite her many pictures of children, she had always been “an animal nut,” Ms. Levitt said. Driving in New Hampshire in summer 1985, she recalled, she asked a man near a barn if he had any animals. They’re coming in now to feed, she was told. Sure enough, an enchanting trio traipsed single file down the country road: a thoughtful-looking Shetland pony, a sedate sheep and a frisky mountain goat. She took the picture.

“It was luck,” she said. “Luck, as James Agee said in an essay, is very important in this kind of stuff.”

    Helen Levitt, Who Froze New York Street Life on Film, Is Dead at 95, NYT, 30.3.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/30/arts/design/30levitt.html?hpw

Digital photography: Has it become an obsession?

Everything we do is captured on camera – and our memories are being superseded by pixels

Wednesday, 11 February 2009
The Independent
By Michael Bywater

On Boxing Day last year, a distraught traveller posted a cry from the depths of his heart on the Auckland community website. "I lost an Olympus digital camera during a trip to Waiheke Island on 29 November," he wrote. "I'm from overseas and have all my NZ experiences and memories in it."

All my NZ experiences and memories.... We've come a long way. Once, this unfortunate traveller would have known that his cri de coeur was what rhetoricians might call a "synecdoche": using the container for the thing contained. "Pass the milk," we say, when we mean, "Pass the bottle which contains the milk". Only an über-geek would quibble. The rest of us do it all the time.

But "memories"? Even the camera companies which have cleverly taken to calling photographs "memories" know they're pulling a fast one. Photographs aren't memories; surely they're containers-for-memories, or memory-joggers? Further down the line, we can say photographs are (or should be) proofs, reports, records, evidence – they can even be works of art. And in a few, rare, photographers like Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau or Brassaï, the graphic line and imagination collide, merge, and produce something new.

But not memories. Thinking of rhetoricians brings to mind the greatest living practitioner of political rhetoric, the young Jon Favreau, Barack Obama's speechwriter. And thinking of Obama brings to mind his daughter Malia, who, at her father's inauguration – one of the most-photographed occasions in history – could be seen taking photo after photo of famous or cool people, shaking hands with Dad.

Further back was a woman who appeared to watch the inauguration on the screen of her camera. She was there. It was real. But perhaps it wasn't really real unless seen on that great tyrant of our culture: the screen. Doesn't matter what screen. Doesn't matter how big or how bright or what resolution. If it's not on-screen, it's not happening.

None of us saw it coming. Twenty-five years ago, when the creatives' favourite computer, the Apple Mac, was born, the screen was a shy little thing. You turned it on, did some work, then turned it off again. Writers printed stuff out, switched off their screens and sent their copy to be typeset. Accountants transcribed their pencil ledgers into primitive spreadsheets then turned off their computers and sat back, rubbing their eyes.

And photographers? Photographers didn't turn it on at all; they still did their work on to silver halides, on film, and in red-light darkrooms. None of us foresaw a time when almost every human activity would be mediated through the glowing matrix of an LCD screen. None of us foresaw the time when the world would become flattened and constrained to the 23-inch rectangle of the widescreen monitor. None of us saw the loss of texture: of snapshots in envelopes and flimsy orange negatives, of slides in mounts and finding the projector and gathering the family. All of us still thought a photograph was something that followed the event, usually after a week's wait; and most of us still believed that, without a projector, a photograph was something that could only be looked at by two or three people at a time.

Over the past decade, though, the photograph has become a commodity; a commodity that (once you've bought the camera) is more or less free. That, and the equally unforeseen rise of the net, the speed of broadband, and the fall in the cost of storage, has meant that this has been the most widely documented decade in human history.

It's time for a new law. In 1961, Arthur C. Clarke wrote that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" (to which Larry Niven responded that any sufficiently advanced magic was indistinguishable from technology). What has become clear over the past decade is that any sufficiently cheap technology will become compulsory. Cheap, almost free, digital photography and cheap, almost free, publishing through the likes of Flickr and MySpace and YouTube: these have led to the paradigm of human activity as being something which is verified by being first recorded, then published.

If not... did it happen? Was I really there?

We've even managed to take ourselves out of the necessary loop. Back in the day, a photograph required focusing, exposure, winding on, taking out of the camera, a trip to the chemist's, a wait, another trip to the chemist's and, at last, the chance to see which ones had come out. No longer. On my iPhone I can press a (virtual) button and the camera will not only take the picture, but will publish it, instantly, on the social networking site of my choice. I do not even have to look at it.

The changes brought about by technology have altered more in our culture than simply making it cheaper and easier to make photographs. One of the many retrograde steps, under the guise of progress, is that the "decisive moment" named by Cartier-Bresson and instinctively understood by all photographers (as opposed to just people-with-cameras) has become next to impossible to do with an inconspicuous camera. Press the button on an old film camera and the shutter fired almost instantly. Now, press the button and all sorts of things happen. There are inexplicable pauses, whining noises, a suspicious, synthesised click which makes you think it's done so you move the camera, and then, finally, it takes the snapshot. A good thing they have a screen: at least you can see what it's actually photographed as opposed to what you wanted it to photograph.

More importantly, perhaps, the nature of the photograph has changed. Its transience makes it seem less real: press delete and it's gone. The passage of photons through the lens no longer effects a permanent change. The image is ultimately disposable. Digital technology's potential for almost infinite duplication, too, has changed the game. Once there was a thrill in going to a photography exhibition and seeing pictures "for real" – not printed, but made from light passing through the original negative and on to paper. Nor does it feel "real" that the photograph is, like everything else, just another damn thing on the screen. It has no texture. It doesn't curl in the hand. The head and shoulders of a love object snipped carefully from a 5x4 print is more real than the same thing Photoshopped neatly from a jpeg file leaving no trace of its theft at either end.

Perhaps this is why documentary reportage has almost vanished: the images are no longer so real, and the making of an image – the idea that something is "worthy" of an image, which we all instinctively did when we only had 12 or 24 or 36 frames in our cameras – is no longer special. Nor is the idea of the reporter, the photojournalist, much respected; we are all photojournalists now: citizen journalists, with opportunities for reproduction and distribution of which the great smudgers of the past could only dream.

The relationship between image and reality has changed. We no longer read photographs as texts, but as a commentary on themselves. "Here is proof," says the photo, "that I was here", but "I" isn't the person who took the snap; it's the photograph itself. If you can't remember where you were or when, your friends, or those you publish the picture to, can transfer it to Google Maps, choose satellite view and zoom in to the building where, at 2.17am on 7 January, you were snapping Jezz on your Nokia and uploading it to Facebook. The whole enterprise was conducted to produce a public image. Sometimes I get a spooky feeling we're being elbowed aside, becoming Morlocks to the cameras' Eloi. What's going on in my computer? Armed with all that data – when, where, how high, how bright – and the endless cross-referability of the web, are my photos becoming custodians of themselves? Is the computer looking at them on my behalf? What is iPhoto doing when it's not active? Was I there... or was it just my photographs?

Clearing through my father's papers after he died, I found his photo folder. A real one, made of battered shagreen. In it was a picture of his long-dead brother; one of his father as a young man; one of his wife as a 13-year-old girl with her mother and sister. Pictures of the dead. Pictures of people who could not be seen in reality, ever again, kept private in his desk drawer. Quite at odds with our way of looking now. But so was the idea of photos on a telephone. Why, he asked, would you want it? "Because they're both media," I said, clever me, "and so converge." "Well," he said, "stew and treacle pudding are both food, but you wouldn't want them on the same plate."

And reality and photographs can both be seen... but I wonder what the young woman at the inauguration will see when she looks at her pictures; or whether she will look at them at all.

    Digital photography: Has it become an obsession?, I, 11.2.2009, http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/digital-photography-has-it-become-an-obsession-1606148.html

Critic’s Notebook

The Polaroid: Imperfect, Yet Magical

December 28, 2008
The New York Times
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

The next few months will end an era that began six decades ago with a contraption called the Model 95 camera. That accordion-style machine delivered instant photography at a price tag equivalent to some $850 today. The SX-70, which spit out color prints, arrived in 1972. American life during the late 20th century had found its Boswell.

The demise of Polaroid’s instant film cameras has been coming for years. Digital technology did it in. The decision this year by the company that Edwin Land founded to stop manufacturing the film has left devotees who grew up with Polaroid’s palm-size white-bordered prints bereft. They have signed up in the thousands as members of SavePolaroid.com. Digital cameras that print instant pictures have materialized to fill the void, providing a practical substitute. But as in most affairs of the heart, logic is beside the point.

Cold-blooded blogs during the last year have dished about Polaroid’s leaky developers and the impossibility of making copies from instant film prints or of fiddling with them, which, by the way, was precisely why police photographers long ago cottoned to them for crime scenes and mug shots. A friend the other day also complained about how Polaroids often came out yellow and, when left on the rainy porch or stuck onto the refrigerator door along with the shopping lists and report cards, ended up faded and curled.

All true. One is reminded of the pragmatists’ disdain for long-playing records when compact disks arrived. Then D.J.’s and audiophiles revived LPs, in part precisely for the virtues of its inconvenience.

That is to say, LPs, like Polaroids, entailed certain obligating rituals. Igor Stravinsky near the end of his life spent evenings confined to a chair. He listened often to Beethoven. His assistant, Robert Craft, would cue the records up, then, when one side was finished, rise from his seat, carefully flip the vinyl disk over, place the needle at the beginning, and rejoin the composer, a simple act of devotion required by the limits of LP technology, endlessly repeated until it became a routine binding Stravinsky and Craft like father and son.

I can still picture my own father with his Polaroid camera. “Cheese,” he would actually say, and the machine would whir before expelling a print with the negative still attached, requiring the shutterbug to wait a prescribed time before peeling it off. My father would check his watch, shaking the covered snapshot as if the photograph were a thermometer. Then at the right moment, with a surgeon’s delicate hands, he would separate the negative in a single motion and reveal — well, who knew what.

Because that was part of the beauty of the Polaroid. Mystery clung to each impending image as it took shape, the camera conjuring up pictures of what was right before one’s eyes, right before one’s eyes. The miracle of photography, which Polaroids instantly exposed, never lost its primitive magic. And what resulted, as so many sentimentalists today lament, was a memory coming into focus on a small rectangle of film.

Or maybe not. Digital technology now excuses our mistakes all too easily — the blurry shot of Aunt Ruth fumbling with a 3-wood at the driving range; or the one of Cousin Jeff on graduation day where a flying Frisbee blocked the view of his face; or of Seth in his plaid jacket heading to his first social, the image blanched by the headlight of Burt’s car coming up the driveway; or the pictures of you beside the Christmas tree where your hair is a mess.

Digital cameras let us do away with whatever we decide is not quite right, and so delete the mishaps that not too often but once in a blue moon creep onto film and that we appreciate only later as accidental masterpieces. In fact, the new technology may be not more convenient but less than Polaroid instant film cameras were, considering the printers and wires and other electronic gadgets now required, but at this one thing, the act of destruction, a source of unthinking popularity in our era of forgetfulness and extreme makeovers, digital performs all too well. Polaroids, reflecting our imperfectability, reminded us by contrast of our humanity.

Glossy talismans in unreal colors, as ephemeral as breath on glass, they wreaked all the more havoc with our emotions for being so unassuming and commonplace. One of history’s least dewy-eyed photographers, Walker Evans spent his last years snapping some 2,500 Polaroids. During the early 1970s, to help introduce its product, Polaroid doled out SX-70s with unlimited film to a few prominent photographers, Evans among them.

He was having trouble wielding bigger cameras by then, and, clunky though it could be, the SX-70 gave him a fresh lease on life. Its point-and-shoot technology nicely dovetailed with his lean, laconic, democratic scrutiny of the world, stripping photographs down to their bare-bone essentials. It was a prosaic machine for an art about prosaic things in which, as in the camera itself, Evans found a kind of grave eloquence.

A contrarian, he also embraced its off-key colors and the fact that many other photographers didn’t take the everyman device seriously (not yet anyway). Along with some fish-eyed close-ups of pretty young women he was trying to impress, Evans composed abstract vignettes and snapped street signs that let him fool around with words and puns as he had done decades earlier and generally better. But he also shot great pictures of ready-mades, like the toothy grill of a junked pink Ford parked in a bunch of weeds, a bittersweet elegy of bygone America that in his hands stayed blessedly clear of nostalgia.

Other artists came to love Polaroids, of course. Warhol recognized it as the perfect tool to capture the gaudy, passing glamour of the disco 1970s, not to mention the genitals of visitors to the Factory, whom he apparently asked to drop their pants for posterity’s sake. (“It was surprising who’d let me and who wouldn’t,” he reportedly said.) Conceptual artists like Vito Acconci identified with its quotidian efficiency and William Wegman made a nice career photographing Weimaraners he called Man Ray and Fay Ray. David Hockney produced Cubist collages; Chuck Close, portraits. The paradox of such a mass-market machine serving elite purposes proved irresistible to many artists and the Polaroid snapshot became a cliché in high art circles, whose diaristic potential continues to lure chroniclers of fashion like Dash Snow.

Ultimately, though, it’s the populist tradition that lends the demise of Polaroid instant film its poignancy: the power of all those ordinary pictures to salvage forgotten lives — and the finality of the moment after which the mass of billions of snapshots preserving millions of anonymous instants of happiness or private consequence ceases to grow and, with us, heads toward oblivion.

In “The Emigrants,” W. G. Sebald’s narrator by chance notices an item in a Lausanne newspaper about the discovery of a dead Alpine climber, a long-forgotten man who happened to have been very dear to someone the narrator once knew and had himself nearly forgotten. The climber’s remains were suddenly released by a glacier in Switzerland, where he had gone missing 72 years earlier.

“And so they are ever returning to us, the dead,” Sebald writes. “At times they come back from the ice more than seven decades later and are found at the edge of the moraine, a few polished bones and a pair of hobnailed boots.”

Or as a yellowing Polaroid snapshot we dumped into a shoebox one day long ago and forget in a corner of the attic; or clipped to the back of the sun visor in the old Buick; or that migrated behind the refrigerator, waiting to be rediscovered.

    The Polaroid: Imperfect, Yet Magical, NYT, 28.12.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/weekinreview/28kimmelman.html

Crumbling South Bronx as a Muse

December 1, 2008
The New York Times
By RANDY KENNEDY

When Ray Mortenson first started taking his cameras through the most wasted of the wastelands that made up parts of the South Bronx in the early 1980s, he devised a helpful subway mantra: Take the 5, stay alive. Take the 4, dead for sure.

This was only because the No. 5 line led through a handful of neighborhoods — East Tremont, Mott Haven, Morrisania — that had been so gutted and burned out during the 1970s that whole blocks were almost completely abandoned, meaning fewer chances of stumbling into a mugger or drug deal.

As a sculptor and photographer, Mr. Mortenson began making these Bronx trips because he was interested in the purely physical and visual characteristics of a once dense, elegant urban landscape that had come to look like excavated Pompeii or Dresden after the firebombs. Not that he would have ever wanted part of his city to endure the kind of devastation it did, but once the South Bronx reached that state he approached it aesthetically, as a “hard-art project.”

“I like being here,” he wrote. “I like the way it looks.”

Mr. Mortenson’s rarely exhibited black-and-white photographs, made between 1982 and 1984, are such powerful artifacts of their era that they have always struggled against being pulled into the documentary realm. And now, in a show of the pictures at the Museum of the City of New York called “Broken Glass” — the title is a line borrowed from the lyrics of the Grandmaster Flash classic “The Message” — the pictures have the added resonance of appearing as the nation confronts its most serious economic crisis since the Great Depression, making them feel like a kind of augury.

“You hear about this happening now in suburban places hit by foreclosures — empty houses, windows going broken, swimming pools filling up with trash,” Mr. Mortenson said in a recent interview at the museum.

When he began taking the pictures, he was working as an electrician and engaged by the ideas of artists like Robert Smithson and Gordon Matta-Clark, whose explorations of urban decay and entropy had made America’s crumbling infrastructure into a new canvas for art.

In the late 1960s Smithson photographed the industrial ruins around his birthplace, Passaic, N.J., christening them as monuments. In the early 1970s Matta-Clark staged illegal “interventions” in some of the same Bronx neighborhoods that Mr. Mortenson was to visit, slicing whole sculpturelike sections from the floors and walls of abandoned tenements.

Mr. Mortenson’s first photographic explorations of this sort took him to the Meadowlands in New Jersey, where nature and industrial decay met in epic combat. Toward the end of the years he spent exploring the swamps he began taking the elevated subway lines through the Bronx and looking out at the rubble that many neighborhoods had been reduced to. As a child growing up in Delaware, he loved spending time alone walking through forests and fields, and he said he thought of the Meadowlands and then the Bronx in the same way.

“I could spend hours walking around some blocks without seeing anyone,” he said. He would wander around Charlotte Street, one of the South Bronx’s bleakest, which President Jimmy Carter had made infamous in a 1977 visit. (It is now in a suburblike neighborhood of neat single-family homes built not many years after Mr. Mortenson’s photographs were taken.)

He would walk through dozens of buildings that seemed to have been abandoned overnight, with coats still hanging on closet doors and furniture still in the living rooms. But the elements had begun to creep in through the broken windows, peeling the paint and causing ceiling plaster to rain down on the floors.

Mr. Mortenson, now 64, began shooting inconspicuously, wearing a beaten-up Army jacket, with a rolled-up New York Post under his arm and a 35-millimeter camera in his pocket. But as he began to learn the neighborhoods, spending sometimes 12 hours a day there during long summer days, he started to lug around a big, boxy view camera. He would set it up on the streets or inside abandoned apartments on a tripod to make exposures sometimes lasting as long as 10 minutes.

“I’d set up the shot and open the lens and then just walk around the building, exploring, until it was done,” he said.

Occasionally he ran into other human beings. Once he was surrounded by drug dealers, who demanded his film, and in the darkness of some buildings he would almost stumble over scavengers ripping out copper wiring and pipes. “You really had a heart attack when that happened,” he said, “and I’m sure those guys were having a heart attack too.”

In contrast to the work of photographers who have concentrated on urban decay from a more sociological perspective, like Camilo José Vergara, or even from an activist standpoint, like Mel Rosenthal, who was shooting the South Bronx at the same time, Mr. Mortenson’s pictures are devoid of people or even cars. Other than notations of the day they were shot, there is no information accompanying them. “I wasn’t carrying a notebook or even a map,” he said. “I was just going where my eye took me.”

Sean Corcoran, the curator of prints and photographs at the Museum of the City of New York, said he was drawn to the images in part because of the tension in them between art and history. “The act of framing and capturing an image from the world is inherently transformative,” he wrote in the catalog for the show, which runs through March 8. “Yet the pictures also provide an important record of a moment in time.”

Mr. Corcoran writes that they insistently ask the question: “How could things get to this point? What political, economic and cultural shifts could lead to such a collapse?”

Mr. Mortenson said he had not returned to those blocks since he stopped taking photographs in the Bronx in 1984. “I’m ambivalent about it,” he said. “There was something about being there alone, about that time, that I guess I want to keep.”

“It was kind of like being in a horror movie,” he added. “But that was all part of it.”

    Crumbling South Bronx as a Muse, NYT, 1.12.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/01/arts/design/01brok.html?hp

Art Review | William Eggleston

Old South Meets New, in Living Color

November 7, 2008
The New York Times
By HOLLAND COTTER

Thirty years ago photography was art if it was black and white. Color pictures were tacky and cheap, the stuff of cigarette ads and snapshot albums. So in 1976, when William Eggleston had a solo show of full-color snapshotlike photographs at the august Museum of Modern Art, critics squawked.

It didn’t help that Mr. Eggleston’s pictures, shot in the Mississippi Delta, where he lived, were of nothings and nobodies: a child’s tricycle, a dinner table set for a meal, an unnamed woman perched on a suburban curb, an old man chatting up the photographer from his bed.

That MoMA’s curator of photography, John Szarkowski, had declared Mr. Eggleston’s work perfect was the last straw. “Perfectly banal, perfectly boring,” sniffed one writer; “erratic and ramshackle,” snapped another; “a mess,” declared a third.

Perfect or not, the images quickly became influential classics. And that’s how they look in “William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008,” a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art that is this artist’s first New York museum solo since his seditious debut.

Naturally we see the work more clearly now. We know that it was not cheap. The dye transfer printing Mr. Eggleston used, adapted from advertising, was the most expensive color process then available. It produced hues of almost hallucinatory intensity, from a custard-yellow sunset glow slanting across a wall to high-noon whiteness bleaching a landscape to pink lamplight suffusing a room.

And compositions that at first seemed bland and random proved not to be on a 2nd, 3rd and 20th look. The tricycle was shot from a supine position so as to appear colossal. The woman on the curb sits next to a knot of heavy chains that echoes her steel-mesh bouffant. The affable guy on the bed holds a revolver, its barrel resting on his vintage country quilt.

Although unidentified, these people and others were part of Mr. Eggleston’s life: family, friends and neighbors. The retrospective — organized by Elisabeth Sussman, curator of photography at the Whitney, and Thomas Weski, deputy director of the Haus der Kunst in Munich — takes us through that life, or what the pictures reveal of it, on a tour that is a combination joy ride, funeral march and bad-trip bender. Patches of it feel pretty tame now, but whole stretches still have the morning-after wooziness of three decades ago.

Mr. Eggleston is a child of the American South. He was born in Memphis in 1939 and spent part of his childhood living with grandparents on a Mississippi cotton plantation. His family was moneyed gentry; he has never had to work for a living. Self-taught, he was already seriously taking pictures by the time he got to college (he went first to Vanderbilt, later to the University of Mississippi); his encounter with the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans pushed him along.

By his own account, unless he is working on commission his choice of subjects for pictures is happenstantial. He shoots whatever or whoever is at hand. The earliest picture in the show, from 1961, is of a prison farm adjoining his family’s plantation. Murky and grainy, it could be a scene from the 19th century; the prisoners are all black. Then come any-old-thing images of post-World War II strip malls and suburbs; almost everyone is white.

Although Mr. Eggleston rejects the label of regional photographer, he was, at least initially, dealing with the complicated subject of a traditional Old South (he says the compositions in his early pictures were based on the design of the Confederate flag) meeting a speeded-up New South, which he tended to observe from a distance, shooting fast-food joints and drive-ins almost surreptitiously, as if from the dashboard of a car.

Around 1965 he started to use color film, and his range expanded. He moved in close. The first picture he considers a success is in the show. It’s of a teenage boy standing about arm’s length from the camera. He’s seen in profile, pushing carts at a supermarket. His face is slack, his eyes a little glazed, his body bent in an effortful crouch. He’s ordinary, but the golden sunlight that falls on him is not: it turns his red hair lustrous and gilds his skin. A prosaic subject is transformed but unromantically; lifted up, but just a little, just enough.

In 1967 Mr. Eggleston made a trip to New York, where he met other photographers, important ones, like Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand, learning something from each. Although he has a reputation for being remote, even reclusive, he also has a public persona as a dandyish hell raiser, a kind of exemplar of baronial boho. In any case he has never lacked for art-world connections. Mr. Szarkowski was one; another was the curator Walter Hopps, who became a friend and traveling companion beginning in the 1960s and ’70s.

These were the Merry Prankster and “Easy Rider” years, when road trips and craziness were cool, and Mr. Eggleston set out on some hard-drinking picture-taking excursions. He also embarked on repeated shorter expeditions closer to home in the form of epic bar crawls, which resulted in the legendary video “Stranded in Canton.”

Originally existing as countless hours of unedited film and recently pared down by the filmmaker Robert Gordon to a manageable 76 minutes, it was shot in various places in 1973 and 1974. (The new version is in the retrospective.) Mr. Eggleston would show up with friends at favorite bars, turn on his Sony Portapak, push the camera into people’s faces and encourage them to carry on.

And they did. Apart from brief shots of his children and documentary-style filming of musicians, the result is like some extreme form of reality television. Your first thought is: Why do people let themselves be seen like this? Do they know what they look like? You wonder if Mr. Eggleston is deliberately shaping some tragicomic Lower Depths drama or just doing his customary shoot-what’s-there thing, the what’s-there in this case being chemical lunacy. For all the film’s fringy charge there’s something truly creepy and deadly going on, as there is in much of Mr. Eggleston’s art. You might label it Southern Gothic; but whatever it is, it surfaces when a lot of his work is brought together.

Images of gravestones and guns recur, but the real morbidity comes indirectly, like mood, through association. A little girl stands outside a playhouse reminiscent of a Victorian mausoleum; a young man sits in the back of a car, dazed, like a zombie from “Night of the Living Dead.” Houses look empty, meals abandoned; an oven stands open, as if inviting entry; a green-tiled shower suggests an execution chamber.

In many of these images color has the artificial flush of a mortician’s makeup job. This effect achieves its apotheosis in a series of commissioned photographs from 1983 of Elvis Presley’s Graceland. Mr. Eggleston depicts the singer’s home as an airless, windowless tomb, a pharaonic monument to a strung-out life embalmed in custom-made bad taste.

But then there are moments of utter old-fashioned beauty, natural highs. You’re outdoors in the farmlands of Jimmy Carter’s Georgia, in a series of pictures commissioned by Rolling Stone before the 1976 election. Or you’re standing under mountainous clouds on a piece of wide, flat earth that is Mr. Eggleston’s family land.

Probably no one asked for this picture. He took it because he takes pictures a lot, and that’s where he was with his camera that day. The clouds just happened, the way clouds do.

As a group Mr. Eggleston’s more recent pictures, in the series called “The Democratic Forest,” add to, rather than develop or depart from, what came with that giant step he took in the ’60s and ’70s. There are more images of pop-cultural glut, unsavory home cooking and soulful skies. There is also more obvious artfulness as his travels take him to Europe and Asia and onto film sets at the invitation of directors like David Lynch, Gus Van Sant and Sofia Coppola, all of whose work he has profoundly influenced.

The color has grown lusher than ever and the angle of vision indirect as we see reality layered on, refracted through glass, in mirror reflections. The world is still chipped and scarred, but cleaner. The subjects in the pictures feel lingered over. The stoned, on-the-road, trapped-in-yesterday rawness is gone. Some of these new pictures really are banal and a little boring, in part because the mess of life gets left out.

This isn’t surprising. Part of being a long-term traveler is that you get comfortable; you relax. You stop living on adrenaline, stop bracing for jolts to the system. The irritated alertness conducive to a certain kind of art subsides. At some basic level the world is less strange and you’re less of a stranger to it, unless you deliberately derange yourself or hit the road again, or adjust yourself to a new now.

Mr. Eggleston, who lives in Memphis, is now on a project with Mr. Lynch; beyond that, I don’t know what his plans are. The America he presented to such shocking effect more than 30 years ago is now full color — not black and white, not North and South — in every sense. The national soul is still as delirious and furious, but maybe a little more sober, or about to become so. I wonder what one of our finest living photographers will continue to make of it.


“William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008” continues through Jan. 25 at the Whitney Museum of American Art; (212) 570-3600, whitney.org.

    Old South Meets New, in Living Color, NYT, 7.11.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/07/arts/design/07eggl.html

4,000 U.S. Combat Deaths, and Just a Handful of Images

July 26, 2008
The New York Times
By MICHAEL KAMBER and TIM ARANGO

BAGHDAD — The case of a freelance photographer in Iraq who was barred from covering the Marines after he posted photos on the Internet of several of them dead has underscored what some journalists say is a growing effort by the American military to control graphic images from the war.

Zoriah Miller, the photographer who took images of marines killed in a June 26 suicide attack and posted them on his Web site, was subsequently forbidden to work in Marine Corps-controlled areas of the country. Maj. Gen. John Kelly, the Marine commander in Iraq, is now seeking to have Mr. Miller barred from all United States military facilities throughout the world. Mr. Miller has since left Iraq.

If the conflict in Vietnam was notable for open access given to journalists — too much, many critics said, as the war played out nightly in bloody newscasts — the Iraq war may mark an opposite extreme: after five years and more than 4,000 American combat deaths, searches and interviews turned up fewer than a half-dozen graphic photographs of dead American soldiers.

It is a complex issue, with competing claims often difficult to weigh in an age of instant communication around the globe via the Internet, in which such images can add to the immediate grief of families and the anger of comrades still in the field.

While the Bush administration faced criticism for overt political manipulation in not permitting photos of flag-draped coffins, the issue is more emotional on the battlefield: local military commanders worry about security in publishing images of the American dead as well as an affront to the dignity of fallen comrades. Most newspapers refuse to publish such pictures as a matter of policy.

But opponents of the war, civil liberties advocates and journalists argue that the public portrayal of the war is being sanitized and that Americans who choose to do so have the right to see — in whatever medium — the human cost of a war that polls consistently show is unpopular with Americans.

Journalists say it is now harder, or harder than in the earlier years, to accompany troops in Iraq on combat missions. Even memorial services for killed soldiers, once routinely open, are increasingly off limits. Detainees were widely photographed in the early years of the war, but the Department of Defense, citing prisoners’ rights, has recently stopped that practice as well.

And while publishing photos of American dead is not barred under the “embed” rules in which journalists travel with military units, the Miller case underscores what is apparently one reality of the Iraq war: that doing so, even under the rules, can result in expulsion from covering the war with the military.

“It is absolutely censorship,” Mr. Miller said. “I took pictures of something they didn’t like, and they removed me. Deciding what I can and cannot document, I don’t see a clearer definition of censorship.”

The Marine Corps denied it was trying to place limits on the news media and said Mr. Miller broke embed regulations. Security is the issue, officials said.

“Specifically, Mr. Miller provided our enemy with an after-action report on the effectiveness of their attack and on the response procedures of U.S. and Iraqi forces,” said Lt. Col. Chris Hughes, a Marine spokesman.

News organizations say that such restrictions are one factor in declining coverage of the war, along with the danger, the high cost to financially ailing media outlets and diminished interest among Americans in following the war. By a recent count, only half a dozen Western photographers were covering a war in which 150,000 American troops are engaged.

In Mr. Miller’s case, a senior military official in Baghdad said that while his photographs were still under review, a preliminary assessment showed he had not violated ground rules established by the multinational force command. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation was ongoing, emphasized that Mr. Miller was still credentialed to work in Iraq, though several military officials acknowledged that no military unit would accept him.

Robert H. Reid, the Baghdad bureau chief for The Associated Press, said one major problem was a disconnection between the officials in Washington who created the embed program before the war and the soldiers who must accommodate journalists — and be responsible for their reports afterward.

“I don’t think the uniformed military has really bought into the whole embed program,” Mr. Reid said.

“During the invasion it got a lot of ‘Whoopee, we’re kicking their butts’-type of TV coverage,” he said.

Now, he said the situation is nuanced and unpredictable. Generally, he said, the access reporters get “very much depends on the local commander.” More specifically, he said, “They’ve always been freaky about bodies.”

The facts of the Miller case are not in dispute, only their interpretation.

On the morning of June 26, Mr. Miller, 32, was embedded with Company E of the Second Battalion, Third Marine Regiment in Garma, in Anbar Province. The photographer declined a Marine request to attend a city council meeting, and instead accompanied a unit on foot patrol nearby.

When a suicide bomber detonated his vest inside the council meeting, killing 20 people, including 3 marines, Mr. Miller was one of the first to arrive. His photos show a scene of horror, with body parts littering the ground and heaps of eviscerated corpses. Mr. Miller was able to photograph for less than 10 minutes, he said, before being escorted from the scene.

Mr. Miller said he spent three days on a remote Marine base editing his photos, which he then showed to the Company E marines. When they said they could not identify the dead marines, he believed he was within embed rules, which forbid showing identifiable soldiers killed in action before their families have been notified. According to records Mr. Miller provided, he posted his photos on his Web site the night of June 30, three days after the families had been notified.

The next morning, high-ranking Marine public affairs officers demanded that Mr. Miller remove the photos. When he refused, his embed was terminated. Worry that marines might hurt him was high enough that guards were posted to protect him.

On July 3, Mr. Miller was given a letter signed by General Kelly barring him from Marine installations. The letter said that the journalist violated sections 14 (h) and (o) of the embed rules, which state that no information can be published without approval, including material about “any tactics, techniques and procedures witnessed during operations,” or that “provides information on the effectiveness of enemy techniques.”

“In disembedding Mr. Miller, the Marines are using a catch-all phrase which could be applied to just about anything a journalist does,” said Joel Campagna, Middle East program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists.

New embed rules were adopted in the spring of 2007 that required written permission from wounded soldiers before their image could be used, a near impossibility in the case of badly wounded soldiers, journalists say. While embed restrictions do permit photographs of dead soldiers to be published once family members have been notified, in practice, photographers say, the military has exacted retribution on the rare occasions that such images have appeared. In four out of five cases that The New York Times was able to document, the photographer was immediately kicked out of his or her embed following publication of such photos.

In the first of such incidents, Stefan Zaklin, formerly of the European Pressphoto Agency, was barred from working with an Army unit after he published a photo of a dead Army captain lying in a pool of blood in Falluja in 2004.

Two New York Times journalists were disembedded in January 2007 after the paper published a photo of a mortally wounded soldier. Though the soldier was shot through the head and died hours after the photo was taken, Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno argued that The Times had broken embed rules by not getting written permission from the soldier.

Chris Hondros, of Getty Images, was with an army unit in Tal Afar on Jan. 18, 2005, when soldiers killed the parents of an unarmed Iraqi family. After his photos of their screaming blood-spattered daughter were published around the world, Mr. Hondros was kicked out of his embed (though Mr. Hondros points out that he soon found an embed with a unit in another city).

Increasingly, photographers say the military allows them to embed but keeps them away from combat. Franco Pagetti of the VII Photo Agency said he had been repeatedly thwarted by the military when he tried to get to the front lines.

In April 2008, Mr. Pagetti tried to cover heavy fighting in Baghdad’s Sadr City. “The commander there refused to let me in,” Mr. Pagetti said. “He said it was unsafe. I know it’s unsafe, there’s a war going on. It was unsafe when I got to Iraq in 2003, but the military did not stop us from working. Now, they are stopping us from working.”

James Lee, a former marine who returned to Iraq as a photographer, was embedded with marines in the spring of 2008 as they headed into battle in the southern port city of Basra in support of Iraqi forces.

“We were within hours of Basra when they told me I had to go back. I was told that General Kelly did not want any Western eyes down there,” he said, referring to the same Marine general who barred Mr. Miller.

Military officials stressed that the embed regulations provided only a framework. “There is leeway for commanders to make judgment calls, which is part of what commanders do,” said Col. Steve Boylan, the public affairs officer for Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq. For many in the military, a legal or philosophical debate over press freedom misses the point. Capt. Esteban T. Vickers of the First Regimental Combat Team, who knew two of the marines killed at Garma, said photos of his dead comrades, displayed on the Internet for all to see, desecrated their memory and their sacrifice.

“Mr. Miller’s complete lack of respect to these marines, their friends, and families is shameful,” Captain Vickers said. “How do we explain to their children or families these disturbing pictures just days after it happened?”

Mr. Miller, who returned to the United States on July 9, expressed surprise that his images had ignited such an uproar.

“The fact that the images I took of the suicide bombing — which are just photographs of something that happens every day all across the country — the fact that these photos have been so incredibly shocking to people, says that whatever they are doing to limit this type of photo getting out, it is working,” he said.
 

Michael Kamber reported from Baghdad, and Tim Arango from New York.

    4,000 U.S. Combat Deaths, and Just a Handful of Images, NYT, 26.7.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/26/world/middleeast/26censor.html?hp

Cornell Capa, Photographer, Is Dead

May 24, 2008
The New York Times
By PHILIP GEFTER

Cornell Capa, who founded the International Center of Photography in New York after a long and distinguished career as a photojournalist, first on the staff of Life magazine and then as a member of Magnum Photos, died Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 90.

His death, of natural causes, was announced by Phyllis Levine, communications director at the International Center of Photography in Manhattan.

In Mr. Capa’s nearly 30 years as a photojournalist, the professional code to which he steadfastly adhered is best summed up by the title of his 1968 book “The Concerned Photographer.” He used the phrase often to describe any photographer who was passionately dedicated to doing work that contributed to the understanding and well-being of humanity and who produced “images in which genuine human feeling predominates over commercial cynicism or disinterested formalism.”

The subjects of greatest interest to Capa as a photographer were politics and social justice. He covered both presidential campaigns of Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s and also became a good friend of Stevenson. He covered John F. Kennedy’s successful presidential run in 1960, and then spearheaded a project in which he and nine fellow Magnum photographers documented the young president’s first hundred days, resulting in the book “Let Us Begin: The First One Hundred Days of the Kennedy Administration.” (He got to know the Kennedys well; Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis would become one of the first trustees of the I.C.P.)

In Argentina, Mr. Capa documented the increasingly repressive tactics of the Peron regime and then the revolution that overthrew it. In Israel, he covered the 1967 Six Day-War. The vast number of picture essays he produced on assignment ranged in subject from Christian missionaries in the jungles of Latin America to the Russian Orthodox Church in Soviet Russia during the cold war, the elite Queen’s Guards in England and the education of mentally retarded children in New England.

His work conformed to all the visual hallmarks of Life magazine photography: clear subject matter, strong composition, bold graphic impact and at times even a touch of wit. In his 1959 essay about the Ford Motor Company, for example, one picture presents a bird’s-eye view of 7,000 engineers lined up in rows behind the first compact car all of them were involved in developing: a single Ford Falcon.

“I am not an artist, and I never intended to be one,” he wrote in the 1992 book “Cornell Capa: Photographs.” “I hope I have made some good photographs, but what I really hope is that I have done some good photo stories with memorable images that make a point, and, perhaps, even make a difference.”

Mr. Capa had three important incarnations in the field of photography: successful photojournalist; champion of his older brother Robert Capa’s legacy among the greatest war photographers; and founder and first director of the International Center of Photography, which, since it was established in 1974, has become one of the most influential photographic institutions for exhibition, collection, and education in the world.

It was because of Robert Capa that Cornell became a photographer. Not only was he Cornell’s mentor, along with Henri Cartier-Bresson and David (Chim) Seymour, but it was on his brother’s coattails that Cornell first became affiliated with Life magazine. In 1947, Cornell’s three mentors founded Magnum Photos, the agency he would join after his brother Robert was killed on assignment in Indochina in 1954.

“From that day,” Mr. Capa said about his brother’s death, “I was haunted by the question of what happens to the work a photographer leaves behind, by how to make the work stay alive.”

The I.C.P. was born 20 years later, in part out of Mr. Capa’s professed growing anxiety in the late 1960s about the diminishing relevance of photojournalism in light of the increasing presence of film footage on television news. But, also, for years he had imagined a public resource in which to preserve the archives and negatives of “concerned photographers” everywhere. In this regard, his older brother’s legacy was paramount in his thoughts when he opened the I.C.P., where Robert Capa’s archives reside to this day.

Born Cornel Friedmann on April 10, 1918, in Budapest Hungary, he was the youngest son of Dezso and Julia Berkovits Friedmann, who were assimilated, nonpracticing Jews. His parents owned a prosperous dressmaking salon, where his father was head tailor. In 1931, his brother Robert, at 17, was forced to leave the country because of leftist student activities that had caught the attention of officials of the anti-Semitic Hungarian dictator, Admiral Miklos Horthy. In 1935, his eldest brother, Laszlo, died of rheumatic fever.

Growing up, Cornell had planned to be a doctor, and, upon graduating from high school in 1936, he joined Robert in Paris to embark on his medical studies. But first he had to learn French. Robert, who had become a photojournalist in Berlin before settling in Paris, had befriended two other young photographers, Cartier-Bresson and Seymour. To support himself, Cornell developed film for Robert, Henri and Chim and made their prints in a makeshift darkroom in his hotel bathroom. Soon enough, Cornell’s interest in photography grew, and he abandoned his longtime ambition to be a doctor. He also adopted his brother’s new last name, a tribute in variation to the name of the film director Frank Capra.

In 1937, Mr. Capa followed his mother to New York City, where she had joined her four sisters. When Robert came for a visit and established connections with Pix, Inc., a photography agency, he helped get Cornell a job there as a printer. Soon after, Cornell went to work in the Life magazine darkroom.

In 1940, Mr. Capa married Edith Schwartz, who, over the years, assumed an active role in his professional life, maintaining his negatives and archives, and also those of his brother. They had no children, but she provided a home away from home for hundreds of the photographers they came to know over the years. Mr. Capa wrote that Edie, who died in 2001, “deserves so much of the credit for whatever I have accomplished.”

After serving in the U.S. Air Force’s photo intelligence unit during World War II, Mr. Capa was hired by Life magazine in 1946 as a junior photographer.

“One thing Life and I agreed on right from the start was that one war photographer was enough for my family,” he wrote. “I was to be a photographer for peace.”

The historian Richard Whelan wrote in the introduction to “Cornell Capa: Photographs” that Mr. Capa “often quoted the words of the photographer Lewis Hine: ‘There are two things I wanted to do. I wanted to show the things that needed to be corrected. And I wanted to show the things that needed to be appreciated.’ ” That is what Mr. Capa dedicated his life to doing.

    Cornell Capa, Photographer, Is Dead, NYT, 24.5.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/24/arts/design/23cnd-capa.html?hp

An Image Is a Mystery for Photo Detectives

April 17, 2008
The New York Times
By RANDY KENNEDY

The phone call was routine, the kind often made before big auctions. Sotheby’s was preparing to sell a striking rust-brown image of a leaf on paper, long thought to have been made by William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the inventors of photography. So the auction house contacted a Baltimore historian considered to be the world’s leading Talbot expert and asked if he could grace the sale’s catalog with any interesting scholarly details about the print — known as a photogenic drawing, a crude precursor to the photograph.

“I got back to them and said, ‘Well, the first thing I would say is that this was not made by Talbot,’ ” the historian, Larry J. Schaaf, recalled in a recent interview.

“That was not what they were expecting to hear, to say the least.”

In the weeks since Dr. Schaaf’s surprising pronouncement was made public, “The Leaf,” originally thought to have been made around 1839 or later, has become the talk of the photo-historical world. The speculation about its origins became so intense that Sotheby’s and the print’s owners decided earlier this month to postpone its auction, so that researchers could begin delving into whether the image may be, in fact, one of the oldest photographic images in existence, dating to the 1790s.

This week the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, which own similar photogenic drawings that once belonged to the same album as “The Leaf,” said that they planned to perform scientific analysis and further research on their images as well.

With these decisions, suddenly, a group of antique images known to the academic and auction worlds at least since 1984 — when Sotheby’s first sold them, fetching only $776 for the leaf print — have become the subjects of a high-profile detective story that could lead back to the earliest, murky years of the birth of photo technology and that could help to fill in crucial historical blanks.

Dr. Schaaf, who said he was not paid by Sotheby’s or by the owner of “The Leaf” print, said that he had been aware of the images — also known as photograms, cameraless prints made by placing objects on photosensitive paper exposed to light — for many years. He had seen five of the six prints that were once compiled in an album by Henry Bright, a Briton whose family was part of a group of scientists and tinkerers active around Bristol in the late 18th century.

But as with so many other early photographic images, Dr. Schaaf said, there was so little information about these that he never gave much thought to their origins. “In most cases we just don’t have any place even to get started,” he said.

It was when Sotheby’s inquiry reminded him that the images came from the Henry Bright family that he began to think about them again and to connect the dots with research that he had been doing for years into a group of photographic experimenters who had long predated Talbot and Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, the other acknowledged inventor of photography.

Probably in the 1790s, according to accounts written shortly afterward, Thomas Wedgwood, a son of the Wedgwood china family, began experimenting with what he called solar pictures, making images on paper coated with a silver nitrate solution. A friend of his, James Watt, wrote in a 1799 letter that he intended to try similar experiments and in 1802 another friend, Humphry Davy, wrote an account of Wedgwood’s experiments in an article for a scientific-society journal, titling it “An Account of a Method of Copying Paintings upon Glass, and of Making Profiles, by the Agency of Light Upon Nitrate of Silver.”

Like the lost plays of Aeschylus that were written about but did not survive themselves, no known examples of the work of Wedgwood and his circle have ever been found. But Dr. Schaaf, in looking deeper into the leaf image, realized that these legendary lost images had something else in common: their creators were all part of the close social circle of the family of Henry Bright.

“The reason that I got so excited about this was that it was the most solid, indicative collection I’ve seen,” he said. “I’m fully prepared for ‘The Leaf’ to have been made by Henry Bright, or by his father, after the 1790s. But I’ve never seen a story that fits together so neatly.”

He added, with the resolve that comes from more than 30 years of research into early photography and Talbot, “Someone could obviously come along and say that these images are all in fact Talbots, but they would be wrong.”

Jill Quasha is the photo dealer and expert who bought “The Leaf” in 1989 as she was building the Quillan Collection, a group of world-renowned photographs that Sotheby’s sold (without the leaf print) for almost $9 million on April 7. She said that it was still too early to say exactly what type of research would be conducted on the image. Tests could include those to determine the age of the paper and to identify the chemical makeup of any substances on the paper.

“I think it has to be done quickly and efficiently and with the least amount of damage to the photograph,” said Ms. Quasha, who added that she hoped the research could be completed within six months so that the print could be put up for auction again with a more iron-clad, and perhaps stunning, provenance. (As a Talbot, it was estimated to sell for $100,000 to $150,000; if it is determined to be older, it could bring substantially more.)

But Dr. Schaaf cautioned that even when the all scientific evidence is in — along with what might be found by deep sleuthing in the archives of the families of Bright, Wedgwood, Watt and Davy — the best that experts might be able to say about it being among the oldest photographic images is “maybe.”

“Somewhere in the course of the work we might find a smoking gun,” he said. “But then again, we very well might not.”

    An Image Is a Mystery for Photo Detectives, NYT, 17.4.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/17/arts/design/17phot.html?hp

Novelties

Instant Digital Prints (and Polaroid Nostalgia)

April 13, 2008
The New York Times
By ANNE EISENBERG

MILLIONS of families once snapped Polaroid photographs and enjoyed passing around the newly minted prints on the spot, instead of waiting a week for them to be developed.

Now, Polaroid wants to conjure up those golden analog days of vast sales and instant gratification — this time with images captured by digital cameras and camera phones.

This fall, the company expects to market a hand-size printer that produces color snapshots in about 30 seconds.

Beam a photograph from a cellphone to the printer and, with a gentle purr, out comes the full-color print — completely formed and dry to the touch.

The printer, which connects wirelessly by Bluetooth to phones and by cable to cameras, will cost about $150. The images are 2 inches by 3 inches, the size of a credit card. The new printers are so lightweight that a Polaroid executive demonstrating them recently had three tucked unnoticeably into various pockets of his trim jacket, whipping them out as if he were Harpo Marx.

The printer opens like a compact with a neat, satisfying click. Inside, no cartridges or toner take up space. Instead, there is a computer chip, a 2-inch-long thermal printhead and a novel kind of paper embedded with microscopic layers of dye crystals that can create a multitude of colors when heated.

When the image file is beamed from the camera to the printer, a program translates pixel information into heat information. Then, as the paper passes under the printhead, the heat activates the colors within the paper and forms crisp images.

The unusual paper is the creation of former employees of Polaroid who originated the process there. They spun off as a separate company, Zink Imaging, in 2005 after Polaroid’s bankruptcy and eventual sale to the Petters Group Worldwide in Minnetonka, Minn. The Alps Electric Company in Tokyo will make the printers.

The potential market for instant printing of photos captured by phones and digital cameras is vast and largely untapped, said Steve Hoffenberg, an analyst at Lyra Research, a market research firm in Newtonville, Mass. “There’s an explosion in picture taking,” he said, “primarily because of the sheer number of camera phones out there on a worldwide basis.” Lyra projects shipments of about 880 million camera phones in 2008.

But it may be hard for the new printers to find a niche. About 478 billion photographs will be taken worldwide in 2008, Mr. Hoffenberg said, most of them by camera phones, but only a tiny fraction of those clicks will end up as prints.

“People can just post picture files on a Web page, or e-mail them to other people,” he said. “These days people have many options.”

The printers might catch on for social occasions like family gatherings, he said, or among teenagers who enjoy exchanging photos, or among professional groups like real estate agents who want to hand an instant image to a prospective home buyer.

The snapshots will cost less than traditional Polaroid prints, which typically have run at least $1, and often more, during the last decade, said Jim Alviani, director for business development for Polaroid. The Zink paper for the printer will sell in 10-packs for $3.99, and in 30-packs for $9.99, so the cost will be about 33 to 40 cents a sheet.

The rechargeable lithium ion battery that runs the printer will last for about 15 shots.

The prints, which are borderless, have a semigloss finish and an adhesive backing that can be peeled off if users want to stick them on a locker or a notebook cover, for instance.

The paper that makes the small printer possible will be used not only with Polaroid, but also with other brands in the future, said Steve Herchen, the chief technology officer of Zink, in Bedford, Mass.

The Tomy Company in Tokyo, for example, will embed a Zink-friendly printer directly within a camera that it plans to distribute, he said. The Foxconn Technology Group of Taiwan will make this integrated camera-printer.

Zink paper looks like ordinary white photographic paper, but its composition is different.

“We begin with a plastic web,” Mr. Herchen said, “and then put down our image-forming materials in multiple thin layers of dye crystals.”

Each 2-by-3-inch print has about 100 billion of these crystals. During printing, about 200 million heat pulses are delivered to the paper to form the colors.

However ingenious the process, Mr. Hoffenberg of Lyra said, people might still not be tempted to convert camera clicks into prints.

“Potential markets can exist because they aren’t tapped, but also because they aren’t actually a market,” he said. “It’s not always evident up front which is the case.”

    Instant Digital Prints (and Polaroid Nostalgia), NYT, 13.4.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/technology/13novel.html

Getty Museum Acquires Penn Photographs

February 7, 2008
The New York Times
By RANDY KENNEDY

The subjects of the velvety black-and-white pictures are not exactly Irving Penn’s elegantly dressed, or undressed, regulars: a plump charwoman with her bucket and brush; a bespectacled seamstress draped with her measuring tape; a deep-sea diver disappearing into his monstrous helmet and suit.

But Mr. Penn considered these blue-collar portraits, called “The Small Trades,” some of the most important of his long and influential career. He began taking them in the summer of 1950 for Vogue, the magazine with which he has become synonymous, and now they have finally found a home together at a museum. On Wednesday the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles announced that it had acquired the entire series, 252 full-length portraits of workers — waiters, bakers, butchers, rag-and-bone men — that it called Mr. Penn’s most extensive body of work.

“This is a set of images that the Getty has been thinking about and wanting to get for several years,” said Virginia Heckert, an associate photography curator at the Getty, who helped negotiate a deal with Mr. Penn, who sold some of the pictures and donated others. “In the last year it finally managed to come together. It’s a very exciting acquisition for us.”

Mr. Penn, now 90, began the portrait project in Paris for a Vogue series on that city’s workers. He continued it for another year after the assignment, seeking out workers in London and then in New York, where he lived, asking them to come to his studio in their work clothes and carrying the tools of their trade.

Unlike the photographs of August Sander, who took more naturalistic, anthropological portraits of German tradespeople and professionals usually in the settings where they worked, Mr. Penn’s portraits, perhaps owing to his training as a painter and a fashion photographer, are more formal and personal. He posed each subject against a neutral background and tried to use natural northern light.

“There is something quite theatrical about the presentation of Penn’s subject to the camera,” Ms. Heckert said. “They’re basically on a stage.”

But because of the isolated setting, the pictures also seem to reveal something about the people as individuals, not just as functionaries. “It’s really about the subject presenting himself in a more intimate setting to his photographer,” she added. “It’s a more psychological relationship between the artist and the subject.” She added that, at a time when abstraction was becoming the dominant mode in the art world, Mr. Penn’s decision to dedicate himself to art portraiture was important and made the series even more significant. “He didn’t want to go away from the subject but to find a way to describe it in utter detail,” Ms. Heckert said.

Weston Naef, the Getty’s senior photography curator, said that the museum had been working to acquire the series for more than five years, but the sticking point had been copyright ownership of the images. In many cases, he said, Mr. Penn and Condé Nast, which owns Vogue, share the copyrights to Mr. Penn’s images. And the Getty, which had long insisted that it be given copyright power over the trade series, along with the master set of the photographs, decided in the end to abandon the copyright demand.

“This was a real advance for this institution to be able to do that on such a large scale,” said Mr. Naef, who added that when it comes to copyrights for Mr. Penn’s work, “it is always a complicated story.” (He and Ms. Heckert declined to say how much the museum paid for the silver-gelatin and platinum prints, whose sale was negotiated by the Pace/MacGill Gallery.)

In recent years Mr. Penn has been engaging in negotiations that have placed important pieces of his work at prominent institutions like the Art Institute of Chicago and the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. Mr. Naef said that the Getty made a compelling case that the workers’ portraits would be well served at the museum, which has extensive holdings of Sander’s work, for example, and one of the best photography collections in the world. The Getty plans an exhibition of the images in September 2009.

“We think he’s one of the greatest living artists in any medium,” Mr. Naef said. “And we like to focus on whole bodies of work. We’re seeing these pictures as if they’re Monet’s waterlilies, a single coherent body of work.”

And in the span of Mr. Penn’s work, he said: “They’re absolutely seminal. They’re like Jasper Johns flags or Rauschenberg’s ‘combines.’ ”

    Getty Museum Acquires Penn Photographs, NYT, 7.2.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/07/arts/design/07gett.html

Known for Famous Photos, Not All of Them His

September 15, 2007
The New York Times
By MICHAEL WILSON

Joe O’Donnell’s glowing legacy outlived him by less than a week. The man recalled by some as “The Presidential Photographer” with a knack for having a camera to his eye at just the right moment, became instead someone described as a fraud who hijacked some of the 20th century’s most famous images and claimed them as his own.

Mr. O’Donnell, a retired government photographer, died on Aug. 9 in Nashville at age 85. Obituaries published nationwide, including one in The New York Times on Aug. 14, praised his body of work over several presidential administrations, most of them singling out one famous picture: little John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting his slain father’s passing coffin on Nov. 25, 1963. That picture was later determined to have been taken by someone else, and a closer examination of photos that Mr. O’Donnell claimed as his own has turned up other pictures taken by other photographers.

Retired news photographers all over the country, some into their 80s, reacted at the claims in the obituaries with shock and outrage as the only rights most of them have to their own pictures — bragging rights — were quietly taken by a man they never heard of.

“The more I hear about this, the more upset I get,” said Cecil Stoughton, 87, a former White House photographer. “I don’t know where he’s coming from. Delusions of grandeur.”

Mr. O’Donnell’s family said his claims to fame — made in television, newspaper and radio interviews, as well as on his own amateurish Web site — were not out of greed or fraud, but the confused statements of an ailing man in his last years. The only thing stolen, his widow and one of his sons said, was the soundness of his memory. While he was not formally diagnosed with a mental illness, he clearly became senile, his family said.

For them, the backlash has been severe and threatens to overshadow what they say are Mr. O’Donnell’s legitimate works, especially his chronicling of the effects of the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

“I just wish people would realize he was an extraordinary photographer,” said his son J. Tyge O’Donnell, 38, who grew up taking this father’s pictures with him to school to show classmates. “Don’t hold getting old against him.”

The story of Mr. O’Donnell’s colorful life and exaggerations continues to unfold. Tales he has told for decades have been questioned. Much of his travel history remains something of a mystery, because of difficulty in obtaining personnel information from the government from decades ago.

The quest for authorship of a number of famous photos is also complicated by the times in which he worked, when many news and government photographers were not credited for their pictures.

More discrepancies in Mr. O’Donnell’s work continue to surface, and there may be more challenges to their authorship. To date, the scrutiny has centered on the years in the 1950s and 1960s when Mr. O’Donnell photographed presidents and purportedly traveled with national leaders.

The scrutiny has extended to pictures he took as a 23-year-old marine in Japan that he said had been hidden in a trunk in his home until he unearthed the negatives in 1985. The pictures were published in a book, “Japan 1945: A U.S. Marine’s Photographs From Ground Zero,” (Vanderbilt University Press). The authenticity of those pictures has not been disproved.

If Mr. O’Donnell lied about his pictures, it is unclear why. He did not appear to reap financial gains from his claims. Perhaps desire for recognition played a role. He worked for the United States Information Agency, a government body that carried out overseas educational, cultural and media programs.

While he was believed to have witnessed important moments in history, he remained unknown to the public. But his family insisted that he simply confused attending various events with photographing them.

The controversy began with the obituaries describing his role in taking a famous picture of 3-year-old “John-John,” as was John F. Kennedy Jr.’s nickname, at the funeral.

Stan Stearns, a 72-year-old wedding photographer in Annapolis, Md., knows that picture well. He took it.

A photographer for United Press International, he kept a close eye that day on the first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, and her children.

“I’m watching her, and she bent down, whispered in his ear,” Mr. Stearns recalled in a recent interview. “The hand went up. Click — one exposure. That was it. That was the picture.”

Mr. Stearns quit in 1970 and has been shooting weddings and portraits since. “I am very, very proud to have contributed this photograph to history,” he said.

But, it seems, so was Mr. O’Donnell.

He said for years that he was at the funeral and that he photographed the boy. “I had a telephoto lens on my camera, and we were across the street behind what we called the ‘bull rope,’ that we had to stay there,” he said in an interview on CNN in 1999.

The image showed on CNN that day was not his own. But neither was it the picture taken by Mr. Stearns, which leads to another complicating factor surrounding the John-John salute: several photographers captured the image that day, each distributed in different newspapers and magazines, many times without credit.

The salute picture broadcast on CNN in 1999 was actually taken by Dan Farrell, then with The Daily News. Now 76, he recalled the picture in an interview last week. “You never want to miss one like that, you know?”

Mr. O’Donnell often spoke of a picture, but his son said he never saw it.

The complaints over the John-John picture expanded to a fuller investigation of Mr. O’Donnell’s career by a group of mostly retired photographers and reporters angered by his false claim.

Several photographs at a Nashville art gallery called the Arts Company, which had represented Mr. O’Donnell and displayed more than 80 of his pictures, were found not to be his own. One of them, a famous image of President Kennedy piloting a yacht, is without question one taken by the photographer Robert Knudsen in 1962, said James Hill, the audio and visual archives specialist at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.

Another renowned photographer, Elliott Erwitt, has become forever linked to the “Kitchen Debate” in Moscow in 1959, for his famous photograph of Vice President Richard Nixon poking Nikita S. Khrushchev in the chest during a heated exchange. He even attended an anniversary reception 25 years later, playfully poking Mr. Nixon in the chest.

So Mr. Erwitt was stunned when he was shown a late-1990s video of Mr. O’Donnell speaking with a Nashville news anchor, and Mr. O’Donnell’s description of having taken the picture.

“They were arguing,” Mr. O’Donnell told the reporter. “Khrushchev was very belligerent and said, ‘We’re gonna bury you.’ And Nixon reacted just as fast as he did, and pointed his finger at him and said, ‘You’ll never bury us.’ ”

Of course, this was mistaken. Mr. Khrushchev’s famous line, “We will bury you,” was delivered three years earlier, in 1956 in Moscow before Western representatives.

Watching Mr. O’Donnell’s interview last week, Mr. Erwitt said, “Unbelievable. The picture is so well known.”

The list goes on. A picture the museum said was taken by Mr. O’Donnell of the Tehran Conference of Joseph Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in 1943 is suspect. It has been credited in the past to the Associated Press and the United States Army Signal Corps, but its authorship remains unclear.

Mr. O’Donnell was born on May 7, 1922, in Johnstown, Pa., his family said. He joined the Marines shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, his son said. After the war and his trip to Japan, he worked for the State Department and later the Information Agency, upon its creation in 1953.

An archivist’s paper for a 1998 National Archives conference on cold war documentation cites several of the assignments in 1948 that took Mr. O’Donnell “from the home of a truck driver in Arlington, Va., to the Cherokee Reservation in North Carolina to small-town polling stations in Lancaster County, Penn.” In an interview, the archivist, Nicholas Natanson, said he had examined the collection of photographs taken at the Kennedy funeral and found none taken by Mr. O’Donnell. But he said some photographs had no credits.

Pictures of Mr. O’Donnell standing beside several presidents were some of his proudest possessions, his son said, and there is archival evidence that he photographed Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Lyndon B. Johnson. But while Mr. O’Donnell referred to himself in his later years as a White House photographer, he did not seem to have ever held that official title.

He married four times, and had four children. He retired in 1968 after suffering a back injury in a car accident while working in a motorcade on an assignment. He moved to Michigan, where he owned an antiques store and acted as the sexton of a local cemetery, his son said.

The family moved to Nashville in 1979, J. Tyge O’Donnell said. The Arts Company’s owner, Anne Brown, said Mr. O’Donnell was known in the Nashville community as a former presidential photographer, an image no one seemed to question.

Mr. O’Donnell’s health had declined since Kimiko O’Donnell, 46 and also a photographer, married him nine years ago; they met in Japan, she said. “He wasn’t interested in showing any of his photos,” she said. “He had two rods in his back. Three strokes, two heart attacks. Skin cancers. Part of colon taken out.”

It is practically impossible to say Mr. O’Donnell never sold another photographer’s work as his own, but it seems he did not make any substantial profits off any pictures in the last decade or so.

“Where’s the money?” Mrs. O’Donnell asked. The museum owner, Ms. Brown, said she kept several prints Mr. O’Donnell claimed to have taken for sale in a box, but that she had sold only 9 or 10 over a period of years.

When Ms. Brown learned of Mr. O’Donnell’s death, she uploaded to the Web site the dozens of pictures from a computer disk provided by his family years earlier. She also sent a press release about the “Presidential Photographer” to Ventures Public Relations, which sent it to news outlets with misidentified photos of John-John’s salute and President Roosevelt attached.

The O’Donnells had one bit of what looked like good news these past weeks. Mrs. O’Donnell discovered, among her husband’s things, a photograph of John-John, saluting the president’s casket. Mr. O’Donnell had signed the back.

But yesterday, the National Archives matched it to a picture in its collection, and while there is no photographer’s name attached, the picture has been credited as having been taken by someone with U.P.I.

“That is disappointing,” Mr. O’Donnell’s son J. Tyge, said yesterday. “But it doesn’t mean he wasn’t there.”

    Known for Famous Photos, Not All of Them His, NYT, 15.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/15/nyregion/15photographer.html?hp

U.S. Searching for Iwo Jima Marine

June 22, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:51 a.m. ET
The New York Times

TOKYO (AP) -- An American team searching for the remains of a Marine combat photographer who filmed the iconic flag-raising on Iwo Jima is honing in on the cave where he was believed to have been killed 62 years ago, officials said Friday.

A lead from a private citizen prompted the search for the remains of Sgt. William H. Genaust, who was killed nine days after filming the flag-raising atop Iwo Jima's Mount Suribachi. The seven-member team -- the first on the Japanese island in 60 years -- is also searching for other Americans killed in the battle, one of the fiercest and most symbolic of World War II.

''The team is finding caves that have been cleaned out, and some that have collapsed,'' said Lt. Col. Mark Brown, a spokesman for the Joint POW/MIA Accounting office, or JPAC.

The preliminary search team is looking for the remains of as many Americans as it can find, Brown told The Associated Press. He said 250 U.S. service members from the Iwo Jima campaign are among the 88,000 missing from World War II.

Iwo Jima was officially taken on March 26, 1945, after 31-day battle that pitted some 100,000 U.S. troops against 21,200 Japanese -- a turning point in the war with Japan. Some 6,821 Americans were killed and nearly 22,000 injured. Only 1,033 Japanese survived.

''Our motto is `until they are home,''' Brown said. ''`No man left behind' is a promise made to every individual who raises his hand.''

Brown said a full team would be sent in if it looks like remains are likely to be discovered.

Genaust, a combat photographer with the 28th Marines, filmed the raising of the flag atop Mount Suribachi on Feb. 23, 1945. He stood just feet away from AP photographer Joe Rosenthal, whose photograph of the moment won a Pulitzer Prize and came to symbolize the Pacific War and the struggle of the Marines to capture the tiny island.

Johnnie Webb, a civilian official with JPAC, said Genaust died nine days later when he was hit by machine-gun fire as he was assisting fellow Marines secure a cave. He was 38.

Bob Bolus, the Scranton, Pa., businessman who provided the lead in the search, said he became intrigued by Genaust after reading a Parade magazine story about him two years ago. Spending thousands of dollars of his own money, Bolus put together a team of experts, including an archivist, forensic anthropologist, geologist and surveyor, that was able to pinpoint where Genaust's remains were likely to be found.

Bolus, 64, began lobbying the military to search anew for the missing Marine.

''How do we leave an American?'' he said in a telephone interview. ''How do we ignore him and leave him in a cave along with other military personnel who are MIA on the island also? He gave us a patriotic symbol that we see to this day. It's important.''

Bolus, who said he visited Iwo Jima last year and met the grandson of Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi, the Japanese commander on Iwo Jima, said he's confident Genaust will be found.

''We've put everything in place. Now we have to have him tell us where he is.''

JPAC said the search was the first on Iwo Jima ''since 1948, when the American Graves Registration Service recovered most U.S. service members killed during the campaign.''

Many of the missing Marines were lost at sea, meaning the chances of recovering their remains are slim. But many also were killed in caves or buried by explosions, and Brown said officials were optimistic about finding the remains of Genaust and other servicemen.

''We are looking at several caves,'' he said. ''We are looking for a number of service members, including Genaust. We have maps dating back to World War II and even GPS locations. So far, everything seems to be where it should be.''

Accounts of Genaust's death vary, but he was believed to have been killed in or near a cave on ''Hill 362A.''

On March 4, 1945, Marines were securing the cave, and are believed to have asked Genaust to use his movie camera light to illuminate their way. He volunteered to shine the light in the cave, and when he did he was killed by enemy fire. The cave was secured after a gunfight, and its entrance sealed.

''We decided that the only way to determine if his remains were there was to work on the ground,'' Webb said. ''We believe his remains may be in there, along with the remains of the Japanese.''

Separately, Japan on Monday returned to using the prewar name for Iwo Jima at the urging of its original inhabitants, who want to reclaim an identity they say has been hijacked by high-profile movies like Clint Eastwood's ''Letters from Iwo Jima.''

The new name, Iwo To, was adopted by the Japanese Geographical Survey Institute in consultation with Japan's coast guard.

----------

Associated Press writer Michael Rubinkam contributed to this report from Philadelphia.

    U.S. Searching for Iwo Jima Marine, NYT, 22.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iwo-Jima-Marine.html

Basics

Portable Media Players Aim for the Masses

October 19, 2006
The New York Times
By MICHEL MARRIOTT

SEDUCTIVELY lighted music players may be hogging retail shelf space, but their overshadowed cousin, the portable media player, is looking increasingly attractive.

A new generation of portable media players — primarily designed to play video but, in some instances, to record it — is arriving in stores and on the Web. Many of the players are svelte, easy to use and less expensive than their predecessors. They can hold music videos or full-length movies, as well as play music and display digital photos. And more consumers are taking notice.

EchoStar Communications, the parent company of the satellite television service Dish Network, has done more than take notice. This fall, Dish Network is promoting a line of media players that customers can use to record or transfer television programs and movies for portable viewing. The devices, which the company is calling PocketDish players, are priced from $150 to $400.

“The key to this is the on-the-go lifestyle, people on trains, commuting, on planes, families with a digital video recorder but no time to sit and watch the programs on television,” said Cory Jo Vasquez, an EchoStar spokeswoman.

Meanwhile, broadening lines of media players are available at national outlets like Wal-Mart and RadioShack. Executives at Archos, the French company widely credited with creating the category in 2002, said that the number of retail outlets for its products in the United States had increased to 7,000 this fall, from 1,600 in July.

Part of the allure, consumers and retailers say, is that the category is maturing, offering more features at lower prices. Media players start as low as $100 and generally cost no more than $500 for full-featured models with large, bright screens, high storage capacity and recording options.

“The notion of viewing video on portable devices started to be a lot more popular after Apple introduced that functionality on the iPod,” said Ross Rubin, a consumer electronics analyst, referring to the fifth-generation iPod introduced last fall.

But Mr. Rubin, the director of industry analysis for the NPD Group, noted that the video-enabled iPod uses a smallish liquid-crystal-display screen (2.5 inches) for playback, as do other music players that also play video, including the Microsoft Zune, scheduled for release next month.

Dedicated media players with larger screens have tended to be bulky and overly complicated, critics have noted. They also have generally cost much more than music players that double as video players, Mr. Rubin said. For example, an entry-level iPod that plays video costs about $250. Last year, large-screen video players could easily cost twice that; now they are typically priced at $300 to $400.

“Those are still not high-volume products within the portable media player category,” Mr. Rubin said of the larger, feature-laden video players. “They are not a mainstream phenomenon yet.”

But Larry Smith, chief operating officer for Archos, said consumers had made it clear this year that what they wanted were portable devices that could richly and easily deliver video entertainment. “We think that is a validation of what we have been developing over the last four to five years.”

Mr. Smith noted that not only had media player technologies greatly improved this year, so had the means for getting content for the players, whether recording it directly on the players, dragging and dropping video files from computers, or transferring video from digital recorders like TiVo and on-demand services like AOL Video.

Archos’s products include the new 404 ($300, or $350 for a model that records video in DVD quality) and the 504 (which comes in 40-, 80- and 160-gigabyte versions that cost $350, $400 and $600). At the top of the line is the Archos 604, a full-featured player that the company says is the thinnest wide-screen device on the market, at 0.6 inches.

The 604 ($350) has a bright, high-resolution 4.3-inch screen and a 30-gigabyte hard drive that Archos representatives say can store up to 85 movies, 300,000 pictures or 15,000 songs. The 604 can read all standard video formats with DVD resolution; the absence of that ability has hindered many other media players, analysts said.

A standout feature of the new Archos media players is the introduction of the DVR station. It is a separate dock that houses the players’ video recording capacity and a collection of audiovisual input, output and data ports. Mr. Smith said that moving the recording function to the accessory (which costs $100, or $80 when purchased with a player) allowed the players to be smaller and less expensive, yet have larger screens.

The docking station can schedule recording from most sources, including televisions, cable and satellite set-top boxes, DVD players and videocassette recorders, Mr. Smith said. The station can also play content on television at DVD quality and in 5.1 surround sound. Later this fall, Mr. Smith said, the 604 will come in a Wi-Fi version ($450) that can receive content wirelessly.

The new Zen Vision W by Creative, like the 604, features a wide-screen, 4.3-inch display. It ships with a 30-gigabyte hard drive, but is also available in a 60-gigabyte model that can store up to 240 hours of video.

The Zen Vision W, priced at $300 to $500, reads many of the leading video formats; it includes an FM tuner and voice recorder, but does not record video. Generally, content is transferred from a computer by a U.S.B. 2.0 line.

The PMP7040 by Coby ($330) offers a whopping seven-inch screen. Like the Zen Vision W, it does not directly record video, but it plays video in various formats. It also plays digital music.

Doghouse Electronics, a start-up company in Birmingham, Ala., has recently introduced its first products, the 3.5-inch ($300) and 4-inch ($350) RoverTV portable media players. While both pocket-size devices can play many video formats, they also record from television sets, digital video recorders, DVD players and other sources.

The players use flash memory, and each comes with a 2-gigabyte memory card that can store up to four hours of high-quality video and 2,800 songs, said the company’s founder and chairman, Jim Howard. The players include FM tuners.

Other new media players that store their contents in flash memory — but do not record video — include the K-Pex by Kingston Technology, which starts at $130 and is hardly larger than a candy bar. It has a two-inch screen and one gigabyte of memory built in as well as an expansion slot for a miniSD card. Content, including music, pictures and text, can be transferred by a high-speed U.S.B. connection.

And in a nod to pre-teenagers, Tiger Electronics released last month the Massively Mini media player ($80), a child’s palm-size video and music player with an FM radio and a color screen about the size of a postage stamp. The player has 128 megabytes of built-in storage. It, too, uses a U.S.B. connection to transfer content, including pictures.

For videos, the shiny little player comes with video conversion software. Content suitable for children, including short clips from Cartoon Network and interviews with youth stars like Hilary Duff, can also be downloaded free from www.Tigertube.com. And for adults, the media players seem to have bridged an important divide.

“Typically, I would have said that this would be more geared toward early adopters and men,” said Ms. Vasquez, the EchoStar spokeswoman. “But what we’re finding in doing our research is that women are taking more of a front row in adopting these technologies these days.”

    Portable Media Players Aim for the Masses, NYT, 19.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/19/technology/19basics.html


 

Jerome Liebling

NYT        October 18, 2006

Jerome Liebling’s “Morning, Monessen, Pa.” (1983).
The filmmaker Ken Burns said Mr. Liebling taught him that “all meaning accrues in duration.”

The Still-Life Mentor to a Filmmaking Generation        NYT        19.10.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/19/arts/design/19lieb.html
Mots clés : Anglonautes > Images > photos

The Still-Life Mentor to a Filmmaking Generation

October 19, 2006
The New York Times
By RANDY KENNEDY

For much of a half-century of taking quiet, subtly powerful pictures that demand and reward long looking, Jerome Liebling has been known as a photographer’s photographer. The label is both a high compliment and an acknowledgment that Mr. Liebling, now 82, has not enjoyed the acclaim accorded to many of his contemporaries who first took their cameras to the streets of New York after World War II.

But a more fitting way to describe Mr. Liebling would be as a documentarian’s photographer. And judged by that standard, his work has rarely suffered from a lack of attention. In fact, spend any time watching the films of Ken Burns, or those of the legions of documentary makers he has inspired, and you will see Mr. Liebling’s work, in a sense, even if you have never laid eyes on one of his photographs.

His influence on a generation of nonfiction filmmakers — what Mr. Burns describes as “all of us coming within Jerry’s radiational sphere” — will be the subject of a tribute tonight at the Museum of Television and Radio by several of the students taught by Mr. Liebling, starting in the early 1970’s.

While Mr. Burns is probably the best known of the group, Mr. Liebling also taught Buddy Squires, the cinematographer who has helped to shape many of Mr. Burns’s films, as well as the directors Roger Sherman, Kirk Simon, Karen Goodman and Amy Stechler, who have several Emmys and Academy Award nominations among them. Sometimes called the Hampshire Mafia, they all attended Hampshire, the experimental college in Amherst, Mass., which has produced an unusual number of successful filmmakers and photographers.

Interviewed this week in a Midtown Manhattan studio as he was editing “The War,” an epic soldier’s-eye view of World War II that is to run next year on PBS, Mr. Burns described how he set off for Hampshire College in 1971 with youthful Hollywood dreams of becoming the next John Ford. But under the tutelage first of the photographer Elaine Mayes and then of Mr. Liebling, and no doubt also propelled by Hampshire’s Age of Aquarius idealism — no grades, no departments, no tenure — he fell in love with the power and relative purity of documentary filmmaking.

Mr. Burns recalled how he and his fellow students were terrified of Mr. Liebling. A gravel-voiced Brooklynite who had served with the 82nd Airborne Division in World War II before studying with Paul Strand and joining the Photo League, Mr. Liebling had founded one of the first college-level photography and film programs at the University of Minnesota, where he spent 20 years. The fear was fueled less by Mr. Liebling’s gruffness, he said, than by the fierce honesty of his teaching and by his pictures, which were firmly rooted in the social documentary tradition but seemed to have a resonance that transcended their genre.

“He was so authentic, in a way that a lot of us had never experienced,” Mr. Burns said. “You wanted to be like him. You wanted to tell the truth. You’d go out to take pictures with him, and we all saw the same things he did, and then we’d come back, and he’d put up his prints, and you’d put up yours, and you were devastated.”

He added, still seeming to wince all these years later at the memory: “Sometimes you’d do some work you thought was really great, and you’d show it to him, and he’d stand there for a while and then say, ‘Well ...’ And it was like, ‘Oh God.’ That was all it took. That ‘well.’ You knew you hadn’t done it.”

Mr. Liebling is often mentioned in the company of other photographers with cult followings among their peers, like Frederick Sommer or Dave Heath, whose classic 1965 collection, “A Dialogue with Solitude,” has long been out of print. But Mr. Liebling’s interest in documentary filmmaking — which he has also pursued through the years — has embedded his legacy deeply in the American documentary style that has emerged over the last 30 years.

On the most practical level, Mr. Burns said, Mr. Liebling led him to realize how still photographs could be incorporated powerfully into documentaries. It’s a technique that has become so closely associated with Mr. Burns’s style that Apple’s iPhoto software now offers a feature called the Ken Burns Effect, which incorporates slow, portentous zooms and pans into otherwise ordinary slide shows of family snapshots.

“The essential DNA of all my films issues from still photography,” Mr. Burns said. But Mr. Liebling’s influence on his work, he said, reached much deeper, to a personal and ultimately philosophical level that has guided many of his choices of subject and approach.

“It was this broadly humanistic mantra that he instilled in us,” he said, adding: “Jerry turned me and made me look inward, and it was not always a comfortable thing. I changed as a result of it. It was like molting.” He also taught, Mr. Burns said, that “all meaning accrues in duration — sometimes you have to just slow down and look.”

Mr. Burns smiled and added: “Of course, when you ask Jerry about this, he’s not going to cop to any of it. He’s just going to say, ‘What’s Kenny talking about?’ ”

But in a telephone interview Mr. Liebling actually did cop, at least to some of it. He said that when he was a child of the 1930’s in New York, his photographic impulse from the start was to “go figure out where the pain was, to show things that people wouldn’t see unless I was showing them.”

In doing so, his subject matter was often dark and uncompromisingly noncommercial: the blood-drenched workers at a Minnesota slaughterhouse; mental patients in a state hospital; cadavers used by New York medical students.

In teaching, he said, he tried mostly to impart a deep suspicion of dogma, of piousness and of the compromises that can lie just beneath the surface of American culture. “I wanted them to see that there are no shortcuts,” he said. “It’s too easy if everything is soft, and you can just buy your way and live well.

“I kept asking: ‘Where is your work coming from? Why are you doing it? What is it you see?’ And after a while they started to really look.”

Mr. Liebling, interviewed as he was preparing to drive from Amherst to New York for the tribute, part of the museum’s annual documentary festival, was asked if it bothered him that his work was not better known (though it is in several major collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington).

“Would I want to sell more?” he said, laughing. “Well, yeah. Who wouldn’t?” But he added: “Basically, I just hope that what I have to say in the photographs has validity and that I did it as well as I could.”

Though age has finally begun to slow him, he said, he is still hard at work with a camera and has in fact just returned to printing a series of pictures he first began in 1979 in an apple orchard near his house.

“I guess that’s a long time to be working on an apple orchard, isn’t it?” he said. “But the apples still keep growing each year.”

    The Still-Life Mentor to a Filmmaking Generation, NYT, 19.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/19/arts/design/19lieb.html

Iowa Town, People Evolve in Photo Project

July 29, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:35 p.m. ET
The New York Times

OXFORD, Iowa (AP) -- At first, John Honn felt like so many of his neighbors -- a tad suspicious when Peter Feldstein announced his plan to photograph all 676 residents in town. For some, like Tim Hennes, there was also a reluctance to take part in the ''artsy'' ventures of Feldstein, who despite having lived in Oxford for six years was by some accounts still a newcomer.

Yet there they are, part of a collection of friends, neighbors, relatives, classmates, lovers and ex-lovers, colleagues, drinking buddies and quilting partners, each frozen in an insignificant instant of their lives more than 20 years ago in black and white.

Honn, a buckskinner by trade at the time, seems poised to wrestle bear: With his unruly beard, dressed in frontier-style shirt, pants and moccasins, his right hand clutches the barrel of a shotgun that stands upright by his side. Hennes, 21 when photographed, stands with only a hint of smile on his face in cut-off jeans and a worn T-shirt, his left hand clasping his right wrist at the waist.

''I don't remember exactly why I finally went down to the studio that day, other than I think I felt it had become some sense of obligation because Peter was so persistent,'' Hennes says. ''I don't think people could help but wonder what he was doing ... or what was to be gained from it.''

At the time, not even Feldstein -- who snapped portraits of 670 residents of this eastern Iowa town that summer -- knew what to think or do with his work. After a brief exhibition at the American Legion Hall, Feldstein gathered up his prints and stashed the negatives in storage.

''I had no intention of ever coming back and doing this again,'' says Feldstein, who retired last year after teaching photography at the University of Iowa for 32 years.

Now, more than two decades later, he is tracking down anyone who hasn't died, moved or been sent to jail for another round of portraits.

The same rules apply. Subjects wear what they want. Each stands on the same sidewalk square fronting a plaster wall on the side of Feldstein's Main Street studio. None are posed. Smiles, gestures, expressions are optional. No one is allowed to peek at his or her original portrait before Feldstein shoots a new one.

So far, Feldstein has reshot about 60. Matched side-by-side, the portraits show the obvious signs of aging, maturity, weight gain and loss, graying hair. Babies and children have morphed into 20-something nurses, truck drivers and teachers. But there is also evidence that some human traits and idiosyncrasies are impervious to time and change.

Don Saxton, the mayor then and now, still prefers striped, short sleeved shirts. In both portraits, Pat Henckleman tilts her head slightly left and reveals an enduring fondness for Docksiders. Jim Jirus still wears his seed corn hat cocked to the right.

In the current phase of his project, Feldstein has added a new twist, thanks to the help of friend Stephen Bloom, an author and journalism professor at the University of Iowa. Based on interviews, Bloom has crafted short narratives that lend a confessional, poetic and unvarnished dimension to the lives in Feldstein's then-and-now portraits.

In their own words, Oxford residents share struggles with alcohol or abuse. Some recount romantic first encounters with spouses, their faith in God, displeasure with President Bush or, in the case of Jim Hoyt, the recurring nightmares from being one of the first four American soldiers to liberate the Buchenwald concentration camp in Weimar, Germany, during World War II.

Hennes, photographed again last summer, strikes a pose similar to his original, even down to the way he clasps his left hand over his right wrist at the waist. In his essay, he likens himself to George Bailey, James Stewart's character in the movie classic ''It's a Wonderful Life,'' and shares how his dream of getting out of Oxford to attend college in Hawaii was forever altered by one simple act.

''On the way home one day, I stopped at Slim's, and that's where I met Robin. Today we have two girls, ages 16 and 13. I've been on the Oxford City Council for eight years, and now I'm on my second term on the school board. That trip to Hawaii was my ticket out,'' he says.

Honn, now a Pentecostal minister, was photographed in 2005 wearing a blue blazer, dress pants and tie, his beard neatly trimmed; he holds a Bible in his left hand. In the essay, Honn talks of his former obsession with coon hunting, hearing God speak to him for the first time at age 16, and his religious conversion and beliefs.

''I've seen devils, demons, and angels,'' he says. ''I once had a demon come to my bedroom. His face was a silver outline. I rassled with him on the bed.''

Feldstein says he has no favorites, but is particularly fond of the images and intimate tale of Ben Stoker.

When he was first photographed in 1984, Stoker is a just weeks old, cradled in the arms of his father. In the portrait taken last summer, Stoker, in a T-shirt, long baggy shorts and a baseball cap worn backward, creases a slight smile, his hands clasped behind his back.

''When I was 10, the man holding me -- my dad -- died,'' reads Stoker's narrative. ''Pretty much I think of my dad every day. I remember feeling his beard against my face as a little boy. Two years ago, when I was 19, my mother died of cancer. She was my guiding light. I'd be a liar if I said that everything is all right.''

Inspired by the photography of Mike DisFarmer, whose vast collection of portraits chronicled post-Depression life in the rural South, Feldstein and Bloom say their Oxford Project offers a unique and authentic look at personal change and life in a small, Midwestern community.

''But at the same time, this project is not just about Oxford,'' Bloom says. ''This is real. These people and their stories reflect who we are ... wherever we live.''

Interest in the work is growing. Feldstein and Bloom are negotiating a book deal with two publishers. Next year, they intend to exhibit the work at the Des Moines Art Center and they've had inquiries from other galleries.

Like the people captured by Feldstein's camera, the last 20 years have also brought change to Oxford, which hosted more than 4,000 people in 1948 when President Harry Truman made it one of several whistle stops during his re-election campaign.

Located about 15 miles west of Iowa City, Oxford has grown to 725, its growth evident mainly in the new subdivisions and the commuters who live there.

Gone are the multiple grocery stores, hardware store and downtown diners, victims of the crash in the farm economy of the 1980s. A violent storm in 1998 wiped out a healthy swath of old growth trees that shaded homes along its quiet streets. It's reputation as an outlaw, rough-and-tumble town has softened with the closure of a handful of taverns.

But as much as the project documents changes in Oxford and its inhabitants, Feldstein acknowledges that his work has caused a personal transformation.

''Because of this second time around, I've really come to realize that I love the people of this town,'' he says. ''I'm seeing a goodness and a kindness in a lot of people that I didn't expect it from.''

    Iowa Town, People Evolve in Photo Project, NYT, 29.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Oxford-Project.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Arnold Newman, Portrait Photographer Who Captured the Essence of His Subjects, Dies at 88

June 7, 2006
The New York Times
By ANDY GRUNDBERG

Arnold Newman, the portrait photographer whose pictures of some of the world's most eminent people set a standard for artistic interpretation and stylistic integrity in the postwar age of picture magazines, died yesterday in Manhattan. He was 88 and lived on the Upper West Side.

The apparent cause was a heart attack, said Ron Kurtz, the owner of Commerce Graphics, which represents Mr. Newman.

A polished craftsman, Mr. Newman first learned his trade by making 49-cent studio portraits in Philadelphia. He went on to become one of the world's best-known and most admired photographers, his work appearing on the covers of magazines like Life and Look, in museum and gallery exhibitions and in coffee-table books.

Mr. Newman was credited with popularizing a style of photography that became known as environmental portraiture. Working primarily on assignment for magazines, he carried his camera and lighting equipment to his subjects, capturing them in their surroundings and finding in those settings visual elements to evoke their professions and personalities.

Perhaps his most celebrated image is a 1946 portrait of the composer Igor Stravinsky. Stravinsky, his expression deeply serious, is confined to the bottom left corner of the picture, cropped to his head and shoulders, an elbow resting on the piano, his hand supporting his head. The rest of the photograph is taken up by the raised lid of a large grand piano, strategically silhouetted against a blank wall, which is divided off-center into a gray and white rectangle. The lid forms the reversed shape of a leaning, abstract musical note.

By contrast, his 1949 portrait of the Modernist artist Jean Arp was taken at such an extreme close-up that the viewer sees only a hand, the right eye and a cheek and a curving, sensuous form that is unidentifiable but evocative.

Each Newman photograph had a metaphoric quality. For the folk painter Grandma Moses he arranged a homey shot, posing her in her Victorian parlor like the woman in "Whistler's Mother." The fashion photographer Cecil Beaton was captured, beautifully dressed, in the salon of his English country house. For Andy Warhol, Mr. Newman composed a surreal close-up collage in which he cut out Warhol's features and repositioned them askew from where they would normally be.

The "environmental" approach was what largely distinguished Mr. Newman's portraits from those of his contemporaries. Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, for example, preferred to work within the bald white arena of their studios.

A Face of Evil

Mr. Newman's methods had more in common with the candid, photojournalistic style of portraiture developed by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Alfred Eisenstaedt. But he was more deliberate about composition; his gift for formal design was always much in evidence. He used a large-format camera and tripod to ensure that every detail of a scene was recorded.

"As my own approach took form, it became evident that a good portrait had first to be a good photograph," he said in a companion book to a 1986 exhibition, "Arnold Newman: Five Decades," organized by the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego. The exhibition was just one of many in his career; beyond his magazine work, he established an enviable reputation in the art world. Gallery exhibitions began presenting his work as early as 1941.

Mr. Newman's best-known images were in black and white, although he often photographed in color. Several of his trademark portraits were reproduced in color and in black and white. Perhaps the most famous was a sinister picture of the German industrialist Alfried Krupp, taken for Newsweek in 1963. Krupp, long-faced and bushy-browed, is made to look like Mephistopheles incarnate: smirking, his fingers clasped as he confronts the viewer against the background of a assembly line in the Ruhr. In the color version his face has a greenish cast.

The impression it leaves was no accident: Mr. Newman knew that Krupp had used slave labor in his factories during the Nazi reign and that he had been imprisoned after World War II for his central role in Hitler's war machine.

"When he saw the photos, he said he would have me declared persona non grata in Germany," Mr. Newman said of Krupp.

Mr. Newman enjoyed personifying the stereotypically irascible New Yorker. He often used his gregariousness to coax attitudes or gestures from his subjects. But he never endorsed the critical term widely used to describe his style of portraiture.

"Although my approach has become popularly known as environmental portraiture," he wrote in the early 1980's, "it only suggests a part of what I have been doing and am doing. Overlooked is that my approach is also symbolic and impressionistic or whatever label one cares to use."

He specialized in photographing artists, beginning with those of the New York School of Abstract Expressionist painters, whom he met in New York in the 1940's. He later photographed Picasso, Braque, Miró and other major European Modernists. In the 1960's and 70's his subjects, in addition to Warhol, included Frank Stella, Claes Oldenburg and Louise Nevelson.

He was also admired for his photographs of American presidents, from John F. Kennedy to Gerald R. Ford, as well as world leaders like Haile Selassie of Ethiopia and David Ben-Gurion of Israel. His portrait of President Lyndon B. Johnson was chosen as the official White House portrait.

Arnold Abner Newman was born March 3, 1918, in New York, the second of three sons of a clothing manufacturer and his wife. When he was 2, his father's business failed and the family moved to Atlantic City, where his father became a dry-goods merchant and managed several small hotels. During the Depression the family lived part of the year in Miami Beach, where Mr. Newman's father operated resort hotels.

After graduating from high school in Miami Beach in 1936, he studied painting at the University of Miami, initially on a scholarship. But after two years he was unable to afford college and decided to pursue a burgeoning interest in photography, moving to Philadelphia to work for a chain of portrait studios.

There he socialized with students at what was then called the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Arts, where Alexey Brodovitch, the influential art director of Harper's Bazaar, was teaching. The experimental approach that Brodovitch encouraged apparently found its way to Mr. Newman through those students. His photographs soon showed a penchant for graphic simplicity.

In his time away from work, Mr. Newman began to take social-documentary photographs in the manner of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange and, more creatively, to produce graphically abstract views of city walls, porches and chairs.

He returned to Florida in 1939 to manage a portrait studio in West Palm Beach. Three years later he opened his own business, the Newman Portrait Studio in Miami Beach, which he ran during World War II. He traveled to New York frequently and had the first exhibition of his work at the A. D. Gallery in Manhattan. He met Alfred Stieglitz, Beaumont Newhall and Ansel Adams, then the most influential figures in art photography.

Artists in Their Habitats

Beginning in 1941 he produced a series of cutout collages, in which he engineered Cubist effects by cutting his prints into various shapes and combining them to form disjointed images. He returned to this technique in the 1960's in his interpretive portrait of Warhol as well as similar ones of the artist Dan Flavin and the writer Henry Miller, among others.

It was also in 1941 that he took his first artistically successful environmental portraits. And it was then that he began photographing artists in earnest. Among his subjects were Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp and Piet Mondrian. Most are pictured with examples of their work.

He stayed with that approach for essentially the rest of his career, with some exceptions: his most widely reproduced portrait of Picasso, for example, taken in France in 1954, shows only the artist in close-up, holding his hand to his brow.

In 1945 the Philadelphia Museum of Art organized an exhibition of Newman portraits of artists. When the show, "Artists Look Like This," closed, the museum bought the prints.

After the war, in 1946, Mr. Newman relocated to New York and opened Arnold Newman Studios. By now Brodovitch was well aware of Mr. Newman's growing renown and gave him assignments to take portraits for Harper's Bazaar. One was the famous Stravinsky photograph, which was rejected for publication. But soon Life, Look and Holiday were calling, too. In 1947 alone, four of Mr. Newman's photographs appeared on the cover of Life magazine, and in the 1950's, Life and other magazines sent him to Europe, Africa and Asia to take portraits.

Despite his many assignments for Life, he never joined its celebrated photography staff, choosing to remain a freelancer even after his marriage, in 1949, to Augusta Rubenstein and the birth of their two sons, Eric and David. All survive Mr. Newman, Eric living in Minneapolis and David in Portland, Ore. Four grandchildren also survive him.

In 1953 Mr. Newman's work was the subject of a second museum exhibition, at the Art Institute of Chicago, and by the end of the 50's his pictures were so pervasive — many as advertising assignments — that he was voted one of the world's 10 best photographers in a poll published by Popular Photography magazine.

A Focus on World Leaders

In the 1960's, however, Mr. Newman's environmental approach to the portrait lost favor as rebellious and Surrealist-influenced styles gained in popularity. For some critics and collectors, what once looked so fresh and original now seemed too facile; his attention to powerful and successful men and women appeared, in those counterculture days, as too flattering; and his immaculate work seemed too sleek and too well-made. But the rise of the art market for photographs in the 1970's brought his work to the attention of a new generation.

In 1979 the National Portrait Gallery in London commissioned Mr. Newman to create portraits of Britain's leading cultural and intellectual figures. The work, appearing in an exhibition and a book called "The Great British," created a stir largely because no British photographer had been deemed adequate to the task. In 1992 the National Portrait Gallery in Washington produced an American counterpart, "Arnold Newman's Americans," using pictures selected from his work of the last 50 years.

Mr. Newman remained characteristically caustic about the enthusiasm for what is now known as art photography. "Those who call themselves art photographers are pompous, arrogant egoists," he told The Detroit News in 1993.

Mr. Newman taught photography at Cooper Union for many years, and the book, "One Mind's Eye," a collection of his finest portraits published in 1974, became a popular coffee-table accessory for many collectors. Other books devoted to his work are "Bravo Stravinksy" (1967), "Artists: Portraits From Four Decades" (1980) and "Arnold Newman's Americans" (1992).

Mr. Newman photographed so many of the world's most prominent and accomplished men and women that it sometimes seemed as if there was no public figure that his lens had left untouched. But there were subjects he generally steered clear of: actors, actresses, rock stars and anyone he considered, as he put it, "famous for being famous."

"I hate the whole idea of celebrity," he said.

    Arnold Newman, Portrait Photographer Who Captured the Essence of His Subjects, Dies at 88, NYT, 7.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/07/arts/07newman.html

Art

The Theater of the Street, the Subject of the Photograph

March 19, 2006
The New York Times
By PHILIP GEFTER

IN 1999 Philip-Lorca diCorcia set up his camera on a tripod in Times Square, attached strobe lights to scaffolding across the street and, in the time-honored tradition of street photography, took a random series of pictures of strangers passing under his lights. The project continued for two years, culminating in an exhibition of photographs called "Heads" at Pace/MacGill Gallery in Chelsea. "Mr. diCorcia's pictures remind us, among other things, that we are each our own little universe of secrets, and vulnerable," Michael Kimmelman wrote, reviewing the show in The New York Times. "Good art makes you see the world differently, at least for a while, and after seeing Mr. diCorcia's new 'Heads,' for the next few hours you won't pass another person on the street in the same absent way." But not everyone was impressed.

When Erno Nussenzweig, an Orthodox Jew and retired diamond merchant from Union City, N.J., saw his picture last year in the exhibition catalog, he called his lawyer. And then he sued Mr. diCorcia and Pace for exhibiting and publishing the portrait without permission and profiting from it financially. The suit sought an injunction to halt sales and publication of the photograph, as well as $500,000 in compensatory damages and $1.5 million in punitive damages.

The suit was dismissed last month by a New York State Supreme Court judge who said that the photographer's right to artistic expression trumped the subject's privacy rights. But to many artists, the fact that the case went so far is significant.

The practice of street photography has a long tradition in the United States, with documentary and artistic strains, in big cities and small towns. Photographers usually must obtain permission to photograph on private property — including restaurants and hotel lobbies — but the freedom to photograph in public has long been taken for granted. And it has had a profound impact on the history of the medium. Without it, Lee Friedlander would not have roamed the streets of New York photographing strangers, and Walker Evans would never have produced his series of subway portraits in the 1940's.

Remarkably, this was the first case to directly challenge that right. Had it succeeded, "Subway Passenger, New York City," 1941, along with a vast number of other famous images taken on the sly, might no longer be able to be published or sold.

In his lawsuit, Mr. Nussenzweig argued that use of the photograph interfered with his constitutional right to practice his religion, which prohibits the use of graven images.

New York state right-to-privacy laws prohibit the unauthorized use of a person's likeness for commercial purposes, that is, for advertising or purposes of trade. But they do not apply if the likeness is considered art. So Mr. diCorcia's lawyer, Lawrence Barth, of Munger, Tolles & Olson in Los Angeles, focused on the context in which the photograph appeared. "What was at issue in this case was a type of use that hadn't been tested against First Amendment principles before — exhibition in a gallery; sale of limited edition prints; and publication in an artist's monograph," he said in an e-mail message. "We tried to sensitize the court to the broad sweep of important and now famous expression that would be chilled over the past century under the rule urged by Nussenzweig." Among others, he mentioned Alfred Eisenstaedt's famous image of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square on V-J Day in 1945, when Allied forces announced the surrender of Japan.

Several previous cases were also cited in Mr. diCorcia's defense. In Hoepker v. Kruger (2002), a woman who had been photographed by Thomas Hoepker, a German photographer, sued Barbara Kruger for using the picture in a piece called "It's a Small World ... Unless You Have to Clean It." A New York federal court judge ruled in Ms. Kruger's favor, holding that, under state law and the First Amendment, the woman's image was not used for purposes of trade, but rather in a work of art.

Also cited was a 1982 ruling in which the New York Court of Appeals sided with The New York Times in a suit brought by Clarence Arrington, whose photograph, taken without his knowledge while he was walking in the Wall Street area, appeared on the cover of The New York Times Magazine in 1978 to illustrate an article titled "The Black Middle Class: Making It." Mr. Arrington said the picture was published without his consent to represent a story he didn't agree with. The New York Court of Appeals held that The Times's First Amendment rights trumped Mr. Arrington's privacy rights.

In an affidavit submitted to the court on Mr. diCorcia's behalf, Peter Galassi, chief curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, said Mr. diCorcia's "Heads" fit into a tradition of street photography well defined by artists ranging from Alfred Stieglitz and Henri Cartier-Bresson to Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand. "If the law were to forbid artists to exhibit and sell photographs made in public places without the consent of all who might appear in those photographs," Mr. Galassi wrote, "then artistic expression in the field of photography would suffer drastically. If such a ban were projected retroactively, it would rob the public of one of the most valuable traditions of our cultural inheritance."

Neale M. Albert, of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, who represented Pace/MacGill, said the case surprised him: "I have always believed that the so-called street photographers do not need releases for art purposes. In over 30 years of representing photographers, this is the first time a person has raised a complaint against one of my clients by reason of such a photograph."

State Supreme Court Justice Judith J. Gische rejected Mr. Nussenzweig's claim that his privacy had been violated, ruling on First Amendment grounds that the possibility of such a photograph is simply the price every person must be prepared to pay for a society in which information and opinion freely flow. And she wrote in her decision that the photograph was indeed a work of art. "Defendant diCorcia has demonstrated his general reputation as a photographic artist in the international artistic community," she wrote.

But she indirectly suggested that other cases might be more challenging. "Even while recognizing art as exempted from the reach of New York's privacy laws, the problem of sorting out what may or may not legally be art remains a difficult one," she wrote. As for the religious claims, she said: "Clearly, plaintiff finds the use of the photograph bearing his likeness deeply and spiritually offensive. While sensitive to plaintiff's distress, it is not redressable in the courts of civil law."

Mr. diCorcia, whose book of photographs "Storybook Life" was published in 2004, said that in setting up his camera in Times Square in 1999: "I never really questioned the legality of what I was doing. I had been told by numerous editors I had worked for that it was legal. There is no way the images could have been made with the knowledge and cooperation of the subjects. The mutual exclusivity that conflict or tension, is part of what gives the work whatever quality it has."

Mr. Nussenzweig is appealing. Last month his lawyer Jay Goldberg told The New York Law Journal that his client "has lost control over his own image."

"It's a terrible invasion to me," Mr. Goldberg said. "The last thing a person has is his own dignity."

Photography professionals are watching — and claiming equally high moral stakes. Should the case proceed, said Howard Greenberg, of Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York, "it would be a terrible thing, a travesty to those of us who have been educated and illuminated by great street photography of the past and, hopefully, the future, too."

    The Theater of the Street, the Subject of the Photograph, NYT, 19.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/arts/design/19phot.html?hp&ex=1142830800&en=5ad9e04e5cebea59&ei=5094&partner=homepage

 

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