Archives For Documentary

If you want to study a dynamic style of documentary photographic composition this is the guy to to look at. Always inventive, with images possessing enormous energy, Lee Friedlander explores varied aspects of the American social landscape. You can see most of his work at the The Frankel Gallery web site.

 Lee Friedlander, born in 1934, began photographing the American social landscape in 1948. With an ability to organize a vast amount of visual information in dynamic compositions, Friedlander has made humorous and poignant images among the chaos of city life, dense landscape and countless other subjects. Friedlander is also recognized for a group of self-portraits he began in the 1960s, reproduced in Self Portrait, an exploration that he turned to again in the late 1990s, and published in a monograph by Fraenkel Gallery in 2000. Friedlander’s work was included in the highly influential 1967 New Documents exhibition, curated by John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art. Included among the many monographs designed and published by Friedlander himself are Sticks and Stones, Lee Friedlander: Photographs, Letters From the People, Apples and Olives, Cherry Blossom Time in Japan, Family, and At Work. Friedlander was the subject of a major traveling retrospective and catalog organized by the Museum of Modern Art in 2005. In 2010, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York exhibited the entirety of his body of work, America by Car.

via The Frankel Gallery

 

 

Phylliss Galembo was born in New York but her heart rests in the the eerie depths of the masked ritual and masquerade cultures of Africa, South America and the Caribbean.  Her deceptively simple portrait work is astounding.

via http://www.stevenkasher.com

This new platform is  quite simply astounding. CrowdMedia just might change photo journalism forever with crowdsourcing news photography from anyone on the scene….

Interesting discussion regarding smartphone photojournalism with renowned photography theorist Fred Ritchin here

CrowdMedia’s premise is simple: Crowd sourced social photos shared on Twitter or Instagram are, more and more, becoming critically important to news coverage. So the startup offers an automated platform that gets those pictures out of social media and onto the front page of major news organizations, with rights cleared and money in the owner’s pocket … all within minutes.

“We want to completely crush today’s model of journalism,” co-founder and CEO Martin Roldan told me last night.

On June 7, literally 15 minutes after launching, the platform proved itself.

“There was a shooting incident at Santa Monica College, near where President Obama was. Within the first 15 minutes we were live,” Roldan said. “It was intense in the office.”

CrowdMedia’s platform, which combs through 150 million shared photos every day, searching for the .03 percent that are newsworthy, noticed the surge in attention, found the only photos from inside the locked-down Santa Monica college, cleared the rights with the student who took them, and sold them to publishers.

It’s not every startup that sees that instant kind of proof-of-concept. And the system, which is still in private pre-beta with a small group of media outlets, proved itself again last week during the Asiana crash at San Francisco airport.

“We got photos on the Huffington Post from people who were there,” Roldan said. “We caught these photos mostly by geolocation.”

via CrowdMedia sells everyone’s newsworthy Twitter pics — and could just change journalism forever | VentureBeat.

This was THE landmark photography exhibition of all time.  MoMA brings it back in all its glory.

Walker Evans American Photographs

July 19, 2013–January 26, 2014

This installation celebrates the 75th anniversary of the first one-person photography exhibition at MoMA, and the accompanying landmark publication that established the potential of the photographer’s book as an indivisible work of art. Together and separately, through these projects Walker Evans created a collective portrait of the Eastern United States during a decade of profound transformation—one that coincided with the flood of everyday images, both still and moving, from an expanding mass culture and the construction of a Modernist history of photography.

Comprising approximately 60 prints from the MoMA collection that were included in the 1938 book or exhibition, the installation maintains the bipartite organization of the originals: the first section portrays American society through images of its individuals and social contexts, while the second consists of photographs of American cultural artifacts—the architecture of Main streets, factory towns, rural churches, and wooden houses. The pictures provide neither a coherent narrative nor a singular meaning, but rather create connections through the repetition and interplay of pictorial structures and subject matter. The exhibition’s placement on the fourth floor of the Museum—between galleries featuring paintings by Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollock, and Andy Warhol—underscores the continuation of prewar avant-garde practices in America and the unique legacy of Evans’s explorations of signs and symbols, commercial culture and the vernacular.

via MoMA | Walker Evans American Photographs.

Long obsessed with nature Camille Seaman travels to the ends of the world to photograph the monumental and exquisitely beautiful series The Last Iceberg.

Don’t miss her tornado cloud series: The Lovely Monsters…

all images ©Camille Seaman