Lee Friedlander

Lee Friedlander (born July 14, 1934) is an American photographer and artist.

In the 1960s and 70s, working primarily with Leica 35mm cameras and black and white film, Friedlander evolved an influential and often imitated visual language of urban “social landscape,” with many of the photographs including fragments of store-front reflections, structures framed by fences, posters and street-signs.

Friedlander studied photography at the Art Center College of Design located in Pasadena, California. In 1956, he moved to New York City where he photographed jazzmusicians for record covers. In 1960, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded Friedlander a grant to focus on his art and made subsequent grants in 1962 and 1977. Some of his most famous photographs appeared in the September 1985 Playboy, black and white nude photographs of Madonna from the late 1970s. A student at the time, she was paid only $25 for her 1979 set. In 2009, one of the images fetched $37,500 at a Christie’s Art House auction.

In 1963, the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House mounted Friedlander’s first solo museum show. Friedlander was then a key figure in curator John Szarkowski‘s 1967 “New Documents” exhibition, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City along with Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus. In 1973, his work was honored in Rencontres d’Arles festival (France) with the screening “Soirée américaine : Judy Dater, Jack Welpott, Jerry Uelsmann, Lee Friedlander” présentée par Jean-Claude Lemagny. In 1990, the MacArthur Foundation awarded Friedlander a MacArthur Fellowship.

Friedlander now works primarily with medium format cameras (e.g. Hasselblad Superwide). While suffering from arthritis and housebound, he focused on photographing his surroundings. His book, Stems, reflects his life during the time of his knee replacement surgery. He has said that his “limbs” reminded him of plant stems. These images display textures which were not a feature of his earlier work. In this sense, the images are similar to those of Josef Sudek who also photographed the confines of his home and studio.

He was awarded The Royal Photographic Society’s Special 150th Anniversary Medal and Honorary Fellowship (HonFRPS) in recognition of a sustained, significant contribution to the art of photography in 2003. In 2005, the Museum of Modern Art presented a major retrospective of Friedlander’s career, including nearly 400 photographs from the 1950s to the present. In the same year he received a Hasselblad International Award. The retrospective exhibition was presented again in 2008 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). Concurrent to this retrospective, a more contemporary body of his work, America By Car, was displayed at the Fraenkel Gallery not far from SFMOMA. “America By Car” was on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City in late 2010.

His early work was influenced by Eugène Atget, Robert Frank, and Walker Evans.

Lee Friedlander monograph America by Car (2010):  All the images in the series are taken from the driver’s point of view, incorporating into the viewfinder all of the familiar architecture of the cockpit (dashboard, rear-view mirror, views from side windows and wing mirrors and so on). This claustrophobia presents an American landscape at odds with the car and its driver; the windscreen forms a barrier between the individual and the landscape beyond. The car can only take you so far into the wilderness. The vast majority of the images in Friedlander’s book were made after 2001, and several images hint towards the international concerns of the past decade and beyond. The road – or, rather, whatever passing motorists will notice – is where political voices are articulated in loud, upper case letters: “WE SUPPORT OUR TROOPS”, declares Little Millers diner in Alaska (p. 89). A campaign vehicle covered with pro-Obama stickers (p.104) is a prime example of using a vehicle as a legitimate extension of ideology and identity. [See Martin Parr’s From A to B (1994)].

Endless gas stations, a ubiquitous motif of the road trip narrative, inevitably contribute to the collection.

 

The Americans
Robert Frank (born 1924), along with
Diane Arbus and others, was one of
the founder members of the New York
School of photographers in the 1940s
and 50s. In 1955, he set out on a twoyear
journey across America, during
which time he took 28,000 images
of American society. Only 80 or so of
these images actually made it into
Frank’s book, The Americans. This is still a landmark piece and the documentary tradition owes
a great deal to Frank’s work.
Indianapolis 1955 Robert Frank
Photography 2 Gesture and Meaning 35
Watch a short video about The Americans at www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHtRZBDOgag
Frank produced images that challenged established photographic values. His images had
blurred people and sloping horizons and asked questions of the viewer. They didn’t open up
easily but required careful reading; for this reason, Frank’s work is seen as a major step forward
for photography and its ability to communicate in new and different ways.

Marcus Bleasdale (born 1968) is a photojournalist, born in the UK to an Irish family. He spent over eight years covering the brutal conflict within the borders of the Democratic Republic of Congo and has worked in many other places. Much of his work is linked to fundraising for aid and human rights agencies and there is often a link to ways t donate. His videos are extremely powerful and also discuss what people can do to change the situations the are seeing.

His images are in both black and white and colour and he also does video. They get their power because he is well informed about what he is shooting and knows why he wants hat shot and also has access to people and situations most outsiders would not. But he also has an extraordinary sense of composition and tone. Some of his images at composited (no examples available for download) but I generally find these less powerful.

http://www.marcusbleasdale.com/sources/ipad/index.php#home

Rape of a Nation.    http://mediastorm.com/publication/rape-of-a-nation

Pedagogy of Hope

Wendy Ewald’s work is directed toward “helping children to see” and using the “camera as a tool for expression.” Starting as documentary investigations of places and communities, Ewald’s projects probe questions of identity and cultural differences.

Over thirty eight years she has collaborated in art projects with children, families, women, and teachers in Labrador, Colombia, India, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Holland, Mexico, and the United States. Influenced by Paolo Freire and Kolb experiential learning.

She uses a number of methods for participation:

•  In her work with children she encourages them to use cameras to record themselves, their families, and their communities, and to articulate their fantasies and dreams.
•  Ewald herself often makes photographs within the communities she works with and has the children mark or write on her negatives, thereby challenging the concept of who actually makes an image, who is the photographer, who the subject, who is the observer and who the observed.
•  In blurring the distinction of individual authorship and throwing into doubt the artist’s intentions, power, and identity, Ewald creates opportunities to look at the meaning and use of photographic images in our lives with fresh perceptions.

“Children have taught me that art is not a realm where only the trained and the accredited may dwell. The truly unsettling thing about children’s imagery is that, despite their experience with what adults might call rational thinking, their images tap into certain universal feelings with undeniable force and subtlety.”

“all children have an ability to tell their stories in a very direct or revealing way. Their language is their own, and hey don’t censor themselves, so their baser actions can shift from sweet to violent in a moment.”

 Whether I am teaching or photographing, the crucial pat of my artistic process is human interaction. What is it, finally, that I am doing? Is it some sort of visual anthropology?is it education? Photography? Can I combine these elements and be an artist too?

 Teaching as ‘political act that enables people to understand the powers that use them and the powers they use’

 Pedagogy of hope

In working with others to recognise what they are seeing, what kinds of questions their vision asks of the world and how to allow their perceptions to surface with her own.’.  Louise Neri portrait of a praxis in towards a Promised Land

Biography and key works

From Wikipedia

Wendy Ewald was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1951. She graduated from Phillips Academy in 1969 and attended Antioch College between 1969–74, as well as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she studied photography with Minor White. She embarked on a career teaching photography to children and young people internationally. In 1969 & 1970, she taught photography to Innu and Mi’kmaq Native-American children in Canada. Between 1976–80 she taught photography and film-making to students in Whitesburg, Kentucky, in association with Appalshop, a media co-op. In 1982, she traveled to Ráquira, Colombia on a Fulbright fellowship working with children and community groups; spending a further two years in Gujarat, India. Ewald is married to Tom McDonough, a writer and cinematographer. They live in the Hudson Valley of New York with their son, Michael.

Photography career

In recent years Ewald has produced a number of conceptual installations—for example, in Margate, England and in Amherst, Massachusetts — making use of large scale photographic banners. Ewald was one of the founders of the Half Moon Photography Workshop in the East End of London; and in 1989 she created the “Literacy through Photography” programmes in Houston, Texas, and Durham, North Carolina. In 1992, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.

She is currently senior research associate at the Center for International Studies at Duke University, visiting artist at Amherst College and director of the Literacy through Photography International program and artist in residence at the Duke University Center for International Studies.

In 2011, Ewald coordinated a project in Israel. She gave cameras to owners of stalls and stores at the Mahane Yehuda marketplace in Jerusalem, Arab women and gypsies in Jerusalem’s Old City, schoolchildren in Nazareth, residents of Hebron, Negev Bedouin and high-tech employees in Tel Aviv. This was Ewald’s first attempt to document an entire country, and the first use of digital cameras and color photography in her international projects.

In 2010, Ewald received a Visionary Woman Award from Moore College of Art & Design.

 Works

For  Google images click here

Appalachia: A Self-Portrait (Edited) Foreword by Robert Coles, Text by Loyal Jones, (Frankfort, KY: Gnomon Press for Appalshop, 1979)

Appalachian Women: Three Generations (Whitesburg, KY: Appalshop, 1981)

Retrato de un Pueblo (Bogotá, Colombia: Museo de Arte Moderno, 1983).

Portraits and Dreams: Photographs and Stories by Children of the Appalachians, with an introduction by Robert Coles, afterword by Ben Lifson, (New York: Writers and Readers Publications, Inc., 1985)

Magic Eyes: Scenes from an Andean Girlhood from stories told by Alicia Ewald and María Vásquez, photographs by Wendy Ewald and children of Ráquira (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1992)

I Dreamed I Had a Girl in My Pocket: The Story of an Indian Village with stories and photographs by the children of Vichya, India (New York: Doubletake Books and W.W.Norton,1996)

Secret Games: Collaborative Works with Children 1969-1999 (Zurich; NewYork: Scalo, 2000)

I Wanna Take Me A Picture: Teaching Photography and Writing To Children (Boston; Beacon Press, 2001)

The Best Part of Me, Children talk about their bodies in pictures and words (Boston; New York; London: Little, Brown and Company, 2002) ISBN 0-316-70306-0

Towards A Promised Land (Göttingen: Steidl, 2006) ISBN 978-3-86521-287-0

Who Am I In This Picture: Amherst College Portraits. Amherst: Amherst College Press. 2009. ISBN 978-0-943184-13-5.

Her photographs have also appeared in DoubleTake, Psychology Today, Aperture, Art in America, Harper’s, Creative Camera, Camerawork, and Time-Life magazines.

 Learning Through Photography blog

View from the Tanzania project

” In most schools in Tanzania, students are not learning to be creative. But most children in Tanzania are incredibly creative—the way they play, dance, doodle and solve their own problems shows extraordinary imagination. But they see these two worlds—the worlds outside and inside the classroom—as irreconcilably divided. When we ask kids to use their imaginations to solve problems creatively in the classroom, we are hoping to bring these two worlds together, to show that you can be your creative, playful and innovative self as you go through your education.

In my own life and in the lives of the students here, we’re constantly given images of what we should be or what our education should look like. But what if those images were our images? The pictures in our heads, our dreams, the things we see each day, the things we recognize: what if those were in the textbooks or hanging up in the classroom for all to learn from? And what if we saw ourselves in the images of others, saw that we had the same fears and hopes? And after seeing what we have in common, maybe we would be able to understand the differences a little better.

For me, LTP is first and foremost about moments of recognition, of seeing yourself in the story of a great inventor or in the wary eyes of a child wrapped in a loving embrace.”

Wendy Ewald pdf

Jim Goldberg (born 1953) is an American photographer and writer whose work reflects long-term, in-depth collaborations with neglected, ignored, or otherwise outside-the-mainstream populations. Goldberg photographs sub-cultures, creating photo collages, and including text with his photographs, often written by his subjects.Goldberg is part of the social aims movement in photography, using a straightforward, cinéma vérité approach, based on a fundamentally narrative understanding of photography. Goldberg’s empathy and the uniqueness of the subjects emerge in his works, “forming a context within which the viewer may integrate the unthinkable into the concept of self. Thus diffused, this terrifying other is restored as a universal.” (Art Forum, Summer 1987)

My only agenda,’ says the photographer Jim Goldberg, ‘is to bring attention to otherwise ignored and shunned lives.’ while picturing the grisly surroundings of the welfare population for his 1970s series Rich and Poor and developed with Raised by Wolves, when he documented teenagers living on the streets in San Francisco and LA. ‘I had a sense that their perceptions were not being observed and considered,’ he says, and so he began asking his subjects to annotate the pictures he took, ensuring his photographs existed as ‘thoughtful encounter, rather than knee-jerk reaction’.

Goldberg is best known for his photographic books, multi-media exhibits and video installations, among them:

Rich and Poor (1985) The book includes photographs of people in their homes along with handwritten comments by them about their lives. For example, the handwriting under the photograph reproduced on the front cover reads “I keep thinking where we went wrong. We have no one to talk to now, however, I will not allow this loneliness to destroy me,— I STILL HAVE MY DREAMS. I would like an elegant home, a loving husband and the wealth I am used to. Countess Vivianna de Bronville.” Although the book received one mixed review shortly after publication,[3] other reviews were positive, and it was later selected as one of the greatest photobooks of the 20th century.

Nursing Home The photographs in a 1988 exhibition of Goldberg’s “The Nursing Home Series” were accompanied by handwritten text by the nursing home residents who were the subjects of the photographs

Hospice

 Raised by Wolves (1995)

See Vimeo

A major mixed media exhibition by Goldberg concerning homeless children in California entitled “Raised by Wolves” began traveling in 1995 and was accompanied by a book. Goldberg made reference to other artists and photographers; used photographs, videos, objects, and texts to convey meaning; and “let his viewers feel, in some corner of their psyches, the lure of abject lowliness, the siren call of pain.”

Open See (2009).

 Open See vimeo

Open See, a study of refugee, trafficked and migrant populations fleeing wartorn and economically devastated homelands to forge a new life in Europe. It is a mix of Polaroids and large-format photographs featuring his signature use of handwritten comments, combined with archive snaps and drawings to form a multi-dimensional story.

The project began as a Magnum commission for the Athens Olympics in 2004. Greece’s location on the south-eastern tip of Europe makes it one of the busiest transit hubs for illegal migrants, but Goldberg realised he had touched a seam stretching far further than he had imagined. The photographs and scrawled, smudged comments reveal the aspirations and fears of people who might otherwise remain faceless statistics. ‘All I want is a bed to sleep in,’ writes one. ‘I make one dollar a day,’ says another, ‘and I have despair.’

Three years in, he was awarded a grant from the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, which enabled him to expand the assignment. Nominated for 2011 Deutsche Börse prize

Biography

Goldberg was raised in New Haven, Connecticut in a family of candy sellers. He took an aptitude test in high school that said he should do something in a field where he helped others. He went to college as a Theology major and ended up in photography when a schizophrenic Photo 1 teacher told him he had talent.

Goldberg’s work was featured with that of Robert Adams and Joel Sternfeld in a 1984 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art entitled “Three Americans”; the exhibition was described as “a show of politically charged and socially conscious images.”

Goldberg is a Professor of Photography and Fine Arts at the California College of the Arts and has been a full member of the Magnum Photos agency since 2006. He lives and works in San Francisco. His fashion, editorial and advertising work has appeared in numerous publications including W, Details, Flaunt, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Rebel, GQ, The New Yorker, and Dazed and Confused. He is represented by Pace/MacGill Gallery in New York, the Stephen Wirtz Gallery in San Francisco, and Magnum Photos.

 

Clare Hewitt is a Photographer based in Birmingham, a Senior Lecturer in Photography at The University of the West of England, Bristol, and Archivist for Vanley Burke with Art360 Foundation and The Feeney Archive Project.

After completing a degree in Law at Oxford Brookes University, she went on to study Commercial Photography at the Arts University Bournemouth.

Everything in the Forest is the Forest

https://clarehewitt.co.uk/everything-in-the-forest-is-the-forest/#0

Clare’s practice often focusses on ideas relating to loneliness, isolation and collaboration. In Everything in the forest is the forest, she has worked with a community of 12 oak trees to visually understand how they thrive through connection and communication, to inspire similar behaviour amongst human beings. Everything in the forest is theforest was selected to be exhibited at Landskrona Foto Festival, Sweden, in September 2022.

EVERYTHING IN THE FOREST IS THE FOREST

Clare Hewitt was awarded a GRAIN Bursary in 2019 to support the development of Everything In The Forest Is The Forest, with particular focus upon the making of work in the woodland and developing the work as a collaborative project.   Clare began to look at the affects of isolation through working with a community of individuals and a woodland of oak trees.

As well as developing 24 pinhole cameras, supported by STEAMHouse, which were located high in the oak trees in the form of bird boxes, Clare also developed methodologies to make work utilising the forest floor and the roots of trees.

The pinhole cameras and the other various approaches were ongoing for more than 12 months.

Although trees appear to be individual organisms above ground, scientific research shows that their complex communication methods facilitate survival, nurture and pass on wisdom, and send warnings when they are under attack. In a time when loneliness is increasing, segregation is being encouraged politically, and isolation driven through technology, there is much that can be learnt from the unity of the forest.

Clare is now working towards a major show of the work that will tour nationally.

Other work

In her work in progress, Kamera, Clare exchanges letters with a prisoner on death row in Kentucky, including a landscape photograph with each letter sent. The images become part of his cell walls, and he responds with letters, stories, drawings and occasional photographs.

Clare’s work has been selected for awards including Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward, the British Journal of Photography’s Portrait of Britain, the Royal Photographic Society’s International Photography Exhibition, and inclusion in the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize exhibition. She was the recipient of the GRAIN Bursary Award 2019, and received a special mention in Krakow Photomonth’s ShowOFF 2022.  Her work has also been exhibited at The Palace of Westminster, Midlands Arts Centre, The Royal Albert Hall, The Royal Photographic Society and Library of Birmingham.

Clare Hewitt is a photographer based in Birmingham.   In 2011 she was selected for Fresh Faced and Wild Eyed at The Photographers’ Gallery, and has since been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery as part of the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize, 2013. In 2016 and 2017 she was included in the Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward emerging photographer selection for Eugenie and Kamera, and the British Journal of Photography’s nationwide Portrait of Britain exhibition. Clare has been shortlisted for the Royal Photographic Society’s IPE #161, and selected for 209 Women, a photographic portrait project that marks the centenary of women achieving the vote in the UK in 1918.