Zemni Photography Blog

Category: Theory and Concepts

  • Dorothea Lange

    Lange was finishing a month’s trip photographing migrant farmhands for what was then the Resettlement Administration. In 1960, Lange gave this account of the experience:

    “I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.”
    (From Popular Photography, Feb. 1960, quoted in Wells, p.42)

    The six images in the series were made using a Graflex camera. The original negatives are 4×5” film. This type of camera needs and demands careful composition and is one sheet of film for one exposure. There were other children and a husband in the family but Lange moved these out of the image
    in an effort to construct the connotations she wanted. For example, the image may have recalled the traditional iconography of the Madonna and child in the mind of some

    pp.39–49 of your course reader. This is an in-depth look at the cultural impact of Lange’s Migrant Mother and the FSA project, examining the image in context from the original through to the Black Panther version of the sixties. This is essential reading and expands on what has been introduced here.

    Getty Museum film about Dorothea Lange’s documentary work:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQPS3KI5-yM

  • Early Social Documentary

    To Do

    What moved or motivated the photographer to get hold of his or her camera and get involved?
    Where did it start? What was its purpose?

    Many of the early practitioners of documentary photography remain quite famous today within visual culture for the way that they contributed to the development of film and cinema.

    Early Social Documentary

    Note was not ‘objective’ – long shutter speeds meant was empty. Often moved objects for better effects.

    United States

    Alfred Steiglitz

    Roger Fenton

    Matthew Brady

    Jacob Riis

    Lewis Hine

    The FSA project

    In 1935 the Farm Security Administration (FSA) project was set up to document the experiences of peasant farmers and sharecroppers and rural poverty in the Mid West of America. Led by Roy Stryker and funded by the US government, the project’s team of 17 photographers produced some 80,000 images from 1935–44. Some of these images were made available via newspapers and magazines to a target audience of middle-class city dwellers to help justify the Roosevelt administration’s New Deal, an economic programme designed to transform America’s economy in the wake of the Great Depression.

    The FSA project saw the social documentary genre, with its enquiring insight, recording for posterity and mission to elicit change, begin to cross over into photojournalism or editorial photography. The paid commissioned photographer began to emerge, as opposed to the independent and individually motivated social documentarist. The emerging genre photographer may have had an altruistic motivation but needed the pay to make it happen.

    Prominent amongst the FSA project’s image-makers were Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Gordon Parks, the first black American photographer to work for Life magazine.

    UK

    Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–79)

    Frank Meadow Sutcliffe (1853–1941)

     Henry Peach Robinson (1830–1901)

    Modernism

    Henri Cartier Bresson

    Magnum Photos

  • Lewis Hine

    Source: Wikipedia

    Lewis Wickes Hine (1874–1940)  was an American sociologist and photographer. After his father died in an accident, he began working and saved his money for a college education. Hine studied sociology at the University of Chicago, Columbia University and New York University.

    Hine used his camera as a tool for social reform.Both Riis and Hine made their social reforming images more widely available through magic lantern shows, arguably the YouTube of the time, with the aim of reaching a middle-class audience with some political influence. Whereas Riis presented the urban poor as helpless victims, Hine was committed to social change. Hine was more than sympathetic to the cause and used the setting of the people in his images in a way that endorsed the points he and the committee were making. He wanted to see labour law reform and felt that he could help achieve this by shedding some light on the plight and daily struggle of previously ‘invisible’ people like immigrants and child workers.

    He became a full-time photographer when he was hired by the National Child Labor Committee in 1908 to travel around America for four years documenting and providing evidence of the working and social conditions of children. His photographs were instrumental in changing the child labour laws in the United States.

    Hine was also aware of the dangerous nature of the high rise race – the pace that buildings were going up in New York and the number of fatalities that were involved. The industry guideline at the time was that there should be no more than one death per floor – the Empire State Building has 102 floors. Whilst his images have an almost relaxed feel, the stark background and the drop below reveal the danger that these workers were exposed to.

    During the Great Depression, he again worked for the Red Cross, photographing drought relief in the American South, and for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), documenting life in the mountains of eastern Tennessee. He also served as chief photographer for the Works Progress Administration’s (WPA) National Research Project, which studied changes in industry and their effect on employment. Hine was also a member of the faculty of the Ethical Culture Fieldston School.

    The Library of Congress holds more than five thousand Hine photographs, including examples of his child labor and Red Cross photographs, his work portraits, and his WPA and TVA images. Other large institutional collections include nearly ten thousand of Hine’s photographs and negatives held at the George Eastman House and almost five thousand NCLC photographs at the Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

    In 1936, Hine was selected as the photographer for the National Research Project of the Works Projects Administration, but his work there was never completed. The last years of his life were filled with professional struggles due to loss of government and corporate patronage. Few people were interested in his work, past or present, and Hine lost his house and applied for welfare. He died at age 66 on November 3, 1940 at Dobbs Ferry Hospital in Dobbs Ferry, New York, after an operation.

    After Lewis Hine’s death his son Corydon donated his prints and negatives to the Photo League, which was dismantled in 1951. The Museum of Modern Art was offered his pictures but did not accept them; but the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York did.

     Notable photographs

    •  Child Labor: Girls in Factory (1908)
    • Breaker Boys (1910)
    • Young Doffers in the Elk Cotton Mills (1910)
    • Steam Fitter (1920)
    • Workers, Empire State Building (1931)
    • Two Boys Working on a
    • Loom in Massachusetts
    • The Spinning Room at Carver Mill.

    Documentary film about Lewis Hine’s involvement with the child labour reform movement

    Lewis Hine pdf

    Google Images

  • Jacob Riis

    Danish-born Jacob Riis (1849–1914) was a pioneer in social documentary photography which included identifiable people and was one of the first photographers to use the new technology of magnesium flash. Riis photographed the flop houses where people were stacked at night
    on every available horizontal space. Again these were usually immigrants and Riis showed the squalor they inhabited in his book How the Other Half Lives (1890) which featured the infamous Mulberry tenements in New York.

    For a New York Times (2008) article on Riis visit:
    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/12/opinion/12tue4.html?th&emc=th

    Watch a 10-minute film clip about Riis and his use of the new magnesium flash:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EACoIbokOcc

  • Shirley Baker

    Images on Mary  Evans Picture Library

    Google Images

    Shirley Baker, (1932-2014), was one of the rare female photographers who chronicled life in the north of England from the 1950s onwards. Her street photography was in the ‘flaneuse’ tradition of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, whom she named as influences. Unposed snapshots of people going about their business were juxtaposed with telling graffiti. She had a great eye for composition that has been under-appreciated next to her compassionate documentation and concern for social injustice, with a particular focus on women and children.

    From the 60s, Baker taught photography at Salford College of Art and would always carry her camera modestly stowed in her handbag. In free periods, she began a body of work, spanning 15 years, of the social housing in the area that was being demolished as people lived in semi-derelict slums. Shirley’s work in Salford and Manchester (shot mainly between 1960 and 1973) captured a time of rapid social and economic change in the lives of working class people in Manchester and Salford.”It was a time of much change: people were turfed out of their homes and some squatted in old buildings, trying to hang on to the traditional life they knew.”

    Slum clearances, started in the 1930s, resumed in earnest in the 1950s, and in the twenty years between 1955 and 1975, around 1.3 million homes were demolished nationwide. When Shirley Baker began photographing the streets of her native Salford, it seemed that no-one was interested in recording the human story of these soon-to-be demolished communities. Old ladies sitting on doorsteps in a row of condemned houses, men with handcarts searching for refuse to be recycled, children playing inventively among rubble and abandoned cars. That she chose to preserve these moments on film, now seems like the only perceptive response to a vanishing environment. It was not until 1989 that her first book, Street Photographs: Manchester and Salford, was published and Baker began to be more widely appreciated.

    In addition to her work in Manchester and Salford, she spent a considerable amount of time capturing Camden Market at the height of punk. Her work was often humorous and she added over the years to collections such as owners who look like their dogs and people falling asleep in public.

    Remembering the work of Shirley Baker Phil Coomes  BBC

    Life

    (from Guardian Obituary)

    Born in Salford, to Alec, a furniture maker, and Josephine, a housewife, Shirley had an identical twin, Barbara, who would also become an artist. They both went as boarders to Penrhos College, in Colwyn Bay, from where during the second world war they were evacuated to Chatsworth House, in Derbyshire. Their parents were unfazed by their daughters pursuing the arts professionally after they left school.

    Baker married Tony Levy, a GP, in 1957, and the couple eventually settled in Wilmslow, Cheshire, where their daughter, Nan, was born in 1963. Baker never displayed any of her photographs around their home, although she did like to take pictures of the family. This perhaps summed up the private, almost secretive, nature of her work.

    When Baker studied  photography at Manchester College of Technology, there was only one other woman on the course. On finishing, Baker’s plan was to work in-house at a company, recording processes and producing promotional images. She started at Courtaulds fabric manufacturers before freelancing for other businesses and doing some journalism, including for the Guardian. Baker encountered difficulties getting a press card, so was unable to pursue photojournalism seriously, and believed she was only given the assignments deemed unsuitable for men. From the 60s, Baker taught photography at Salford College of Art.

    Baker kept photographing in later life and completed an MA in critical history and the theory of photography at the University of Derby in 1995. She joined the Mary Evans Picture Library in 2008, and in 2012 had solo shows in Oldham and Salford, with another planned for 2015 at the Photoraphers’ Gallery in London. She was always pleased when people who featured in her work came along to exhibitions. At the opening of the Lowry Gallery in 2000, the Queen not only viewed Baker’s photographs but met some of Baker’s subjects, too.

     

     

  • Documentary typologies for Eugenics

    Documentary typologies for Eugenics

    There was widespread interest in eugenics in Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. Eugenics is based on the idea that some characteristics are ‘better’ than others and that you can improve the human gene pool by encouraging reproduction between people with desirable genetic traits and discouraging reproduction amongst those with less desirable traits. Clearly the belief that some groups were inherently genetically inferior could be used as a justification for all kinds of behaviour, from colonial rule to modern day racism.

    Scientific Racism: The Eugenics of Social Darwinism.  one-hour BBC4 documentary

    Implicit in eugenics was the idea of classification or objective measuring – pigeon-holing people into particular groups according to their genetic characteristics and treating them accordingly. The Victorians, for example, believed that you could identify criminal ‘types’ through their facial characteristics.

    Photography was adopted as a useful tool to facilitate classification.It was manipulated and used by racists and propagandists  to endorse a ‘science’ to the public.  Such photography effectively dehumanised its subjects and turned them into research objects although its creators might have argued that it was simply documentary – showing what was there. It also served a journalistic function, publicising and legitimising racist organisations and ‘celebrities’ like Margaret Sanger.

    In America the eugenics movement was well funded and they produced plenty of indicative material.

    Francis Galton photographed immigrants as they arrived in America, often at Ellis Island. He identified 46 different races through measurement and through facial characteristics on photographs.  Charts were compiled to show what to expect visually of the Negroid Insane Criminal and the Negroid Criminal.  Margaret Sanger’s ‘Negro Project’ sought to restrict the black population, and thus improve the American population, through ‘planned parenthood’ masquerading as health care and family planning.

    For more on Malthusian eugenics and the Harlem Project,
    visit:

    The Nazis took this to the extreme by exterminating groups who failed to match the Aryan ideal – Jews, black people, homosexuals, Roma, people with learning disability – and eugenics fell into disfavour after World War II as a result.

    The Baldwin lecture and a perspective on post genome race:

    http://www.princeton.edu/president/speeches/20100309/

  • Colour Photography

    Wikipedia to be properly edited with links
    Main article: Color photography

    Color photography was possible long before Kodachrome, as this 1903 portrait by Sarah Angelina Aclanddemonstrates, but in its earliest years the need for special equipment, long exposures and complicated printing processes made it extremely rare.

    A photographic darkroom withsafelight

    Color photography was explored beginning in the mid-19th century. Early experiments in color required extremely long exposures (hours or days for camera images) and could not “fix” the photograph to prevent the color from quickly fading when exposed to white light.

    The first permanent color photograph was taken in 1861 using the three-color-separation principle first published by physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1855. Maxwell’s idea was to take three separate black-and-white photographs through red, green and blue filters. This provides the photographer with the three basic channels required to recreate a color image.

    Transparent prints of the images could be projected through similar color filters and superimposed on the projection screen, an additive method of color reproduction. A color print on paper could be produced by superimposing carbon prints of the three images made in their complementary colors, a subtractive method of color reproduction pioneered by Louis Ducos du Hauronin the late 1860s.

    Russian photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii made extensive use of this color separation technique, employing a special camera which successively exposed the three color-filtered images on different parts of an oblong plate. Because his exposures were not simultaneous, unsteady subjects exhibited color “fringes” or, if rapidly moving through the scene, appeared as brightly colored ghosts in the resulting projected or printed images.

    Implementation of color photography was hindered by the limited sensitivity of early photographic materials, which were mostly sensitive to blue, only slightly sensitive to green, and virtually insensitive to red. The discovery of dye sensitization by photochemist Hermann Vogel in 1873 suddenly made it possible to add sensitivity to green, yellow and even red. Improved color sensitizers and ongoing improvements in the overall sensitivity of emulsions steadily reduced the once-prohibitive long exposure times required for color, bringing it ever closer to commercial viability.

    Autochrome, the first commercially successful color process, was introduced by the Lumière brothers in 1907. Autochrome plates incorporated a mosaic color filter layer made of dyed grains of potato starch, which allowed the three color components to be recorded as adjacent microscopic image fragments. After an Autochrome plate was reversal processed to produce a positive transparency, the starch grains served to illuminate each fragment with the correct color and the tiny colored points blended together in the eye, synthesizing the color of the subject by the additive method. Autochrome plates were one of several varieties of additive color screen plates and films marketed between the 1890s and the 1950s.

    Kodachrome, the first modern “integral tripack” (or “monopack”) color film, was introduced by Kodak in 1935. It captured the three color components in a multilayer emulsion. One layer was sensitized to record the red-dominated part of the spectrum, another layer recorded only the green part and a third recorded only the blue. Without special film processing, the result would simply be three superimposed black-and-white images, but complementary cyan, magenta, and yellow dye images were created in those layers by adding color couplers during a complex processing procedure.

    Agfa’s similarly structured Agfacolor Neu was introduced in 1936. Unlike Kodachrome, the color couplers in Agfacolor Neu were incorporated into the emulsion layers during manufacture, which greatly simplified the processing. Currently available color films still employ a multilayer emulsion and the same principles, most closely resembling Agfa’s product.

    Instant color film, used in a special camera which yielded a unique finished color print only a minute or two after the exposure, was introduced by Polaroid in 1963.

    Color photography may form images as positive transparencies, which can be used in a slide projector, or as color negatives intended for use in creating positive color enlargements on specially coated paper. The latter is now the most common form of film (non-digital) color photography owing to the introduction of automated photo printing equipment.

  • Cindy Sherman

    Photographer Cindy Sherman (born 1954) initially used herself as model in many of her works.

    She has taken a stance against sexism and stereotyping since her early photo-series Centerfolds or Horizontals (1981). This examined the poses in men’s or pornographic magazines of the time.
    The images were rejected by the commissioning publication  ArtForum as reinforcing stereotypes.

    Sherman continued to challenge the ways in which women are seen and valued. In the 1992 Sex Pictures she used latex medical body parts to re-create poses seen in pornography. These images mimicked pornography whilst at the same time de-eroticising it, forcing the viewer to confront their attitudes to the female body and pornography and raising issues of voyeurism.
    interview on Sex Pictures with Cindy Sherman

    Sherman discusses the characters she has assumed in her work:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiszC33puc0&feature=related

    Sherman’s History Portraits (1989–90) parodied some of the portraits of women made by the Old Masters and others,
    highlighting the ways in which women have been objectified.

    Untitled (Balenciaga) (2008) explores the world of fashion and its victims. See:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?=MtATCPCC8b8&feature=relmfu

    Vimeo offerings that show Sherman’s early untitled film stills and a later set of Sherman characters – the rich and famous:
    http://vimeo.com/2176377
    http://vimeo.com/35780957

    Clowns (2003-04) was Sherman’s first major piece to
    be created digitally, hence the garish colour palette.
    The imagery examines how make-up transforms the
    individual and questions the complex emotional
    state that lies beneath the painted smile. It is also an
    investigation into what a clown is, why people choose
    to do it.

    For Sherman talking about Clowns and her work, visit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCkSQOaCf7s&feature=BFa&list=PL2DBA1E2449F0FDF2&lf=results_video

  • Wendy Ewald

    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

  • Sebastião Salgado

    Sebastião Salgado (born 1944) was educated as an economist and produced his first book in
    1973 about the poor of Latin America. Other Americas was in the true tradition of documentary.
    In one interview he commented, “It’s not my intention to give people guilty consciences, just to
    make them think.” Subsequent books, including Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age
    (1993) and Migrations (2000), have received worldwide recognition. The images are without
    doubt factual – they are not enhanced or done in a newsworthy manner. Yet at the same
    time they are ‘sensational’ – mud-soaked prospectors in Brazil living and working in hellish
    conditions, hoping to find a nugget of gold in the bucket of earth they carry up huge rickety
    ladders, or the suffering of ordinary people fleeing war and famine in Exodus.
    For a discussion about the photographer as activist, visit:
    www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6fRykp6nRQ