Zdjęcie dnia: Saul Leiter, TAXI, New York 1957

Taxi, New York, 1957 © Saul Leiter

Zdjęcie dnia: Garry Winogrand, Park Avenue, New York 1959

Garry Winogrand, Park Avenue, New York 1959

Źródło: http://www.masters-of-photography.com/W/winogrand/winogrand_park_avenue_full.html

August Sander - portret sociologiczny

Ojciec portretu socjologicznego, klasyk niemieckiej fotografii - August Sander postanowił stworzyć obraz spoleczeństwa niemieckiego XX wieku. Swojemu projektowi poświęcił 40 lat, ale mimo to go nie ukończył, a za życia artysty zdjęcia nie doczekały się publikacji. Wiele negatywów Sandera spłoneło podczas bombardowania w czasie II wojny światowej, część została zniszczona przez nazistów. Na szczęście fragment zbioru fotografii ocalał inspirując i zachwycając po dziś dzień. Sześćdziesiąt z nich można obecnie oglądać w Turley Gallery w ramach Miesiąca Fotografii w Krakowie.

August Sander urodził się 17 listopada 1876 roku w niemieckim miasteczku Herdor jako trzeci syn cieśli kopalnianego. W wieku szesnastu lat poznał fotografa z pobliskiego Sieg i wtedy zainteresował się fotografią. Swój pierwszy aparat fotograficzny Sander dostał od ojca i wuja dwa lata później. W szopie koło domu zbudował niewielkie studio, gdzie portretował pobliskich mieszkańców. W kolejnych latach fotografię praktykował w pracowniach fotograficznych w Niemczech i w Austrii. Później portretowania ludzi uczył się w Akademii Sztuk Pięknych w Dreznie, a fotografii architektonicznej w słynnym studiu Franza Kullericha w Berlinie. Już w 1901 roku, dzięki zdobytej wiedzy stał się głównym fotografem w studiu Greif z Linczu. Dwa lata później zdobył I nagrodę na wystawie fotografii przemysłowej. Wkrótce został właścicielem zakładu Grief, który odtąd działał pod szyldem "Laboratorium fotografii artystycznej Augusta Sandera".

Sander interesował się wieloma tematami, począwszy od portretów i zdjęć krajobrazów, a na fotografiach architektury i obiektów przemysłowych skończywszy. W 1910 roku przeniósł się do Kolonii, gdzie w dzielnicy Lindenthal otworzył kolejne studio. Na weekendy Sander jeździł do rodzinnego Westerwaldu, gdzie fotografował miejscową ludność. To właśnie tam powstały jego najważniejsze prace stanowiące trzon monumentalnego dzieła Ludzie XX wieku...

Reszta artukułu dostępna jest na stronach serwisu "Fotopolis.pl" (August Sander - mistrz socjologicznego portretu, Marta Sinior, 2007):

http://www.fotopolis.pl/index.php?g=300

Zdjęcia Augusta Sandera można znaleźć na stronach Galerii Fraenkel:

http://www.fraenkelgallery.com/index.php#mi=&pt=1&pi=10000&s=7&p=0&a=27&at=1

Zapraszamy do przejrzenia albumów Augusta Sandera dostępnych w naszej ofercie:

http://www.bookoff.pl/search.php?text=august+sander

Fazal Sheikh - Fotograf mało znany w Polsce, ale za to bardzo ciekawy.

It is one thing to photograph a group of people, it is another to try to understand them. For that you need time, and patience, and an innate respect for difference – the gulf between your own religion, politics, economic status, language, and those of the person in front of you. Trying to bridge that gulf with a camera invites suspicion and mis-representation. But at a time when traditional photographic coverage is often limited to a brief stopover and a search for sensational images, the need to take time and represent and understand the people whose lives and values are very different from our own is greater than ever.

To travel, and to observe carefully and with sympathy the people whose lands he travels through, has been Fazal Sheikh’s practice from the beginning. Most often his work has been with displaced people driven out of their homelands by civil wars, drought and famine, struggling to survivefor years in refugee camps where the traditional balance of their lives has been entirely destroyed. He has worked in camps in Kenya, Malawi and Tanzania, where people fleeing conflicts in Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Mozambique and Rwanda were gathered. In the mid-1990s he found Afghan refugees living in camps, who had fled after the Soviet invasion of their country. At the end of that decade he returned to the camps in Kenya where Somali refugees had been living for a decade. He found children he had photographed ten years before, now grown into adolescents, who knew nothing but life in the camps. Since then he has worked in Mexico, Cuba, Brazil and, most recently India, where his latest book, Moksha, examines the lives of India’s dispossessed widows.

In all these communities, the photographs that result are not dramatic nor do they attempt to shock. They are contemplative and respectful:the product of a watchful intelligence. Fazal Sheikh not only makes pictures, he interviews the people he photographs about their lives, transcripts of which appear in his books and exhibitions, to which he adds his own commentary on the people, their country, and the situation in which he finds them.

In 2000, so that this work might be more freely available, he established the International Human Rights Series, which, in collaboration with international galleries, institutions and human rights organizations, uses publications, exhibitions and the Internet to reach a much wider audience.

Źródło: http://www.fazalsheikh.org/

Na oficjalnej stronie fotografa można obejrzeć cyfrowe edycje albumów fotografa:

http://www.fazalsheikh.org/

Album "Fazal Sheikh: Moksha" dostępny jest w naszej księgarni:

http://www.bookoff.pl/product-pol-1592-Fazal-Sheikh-Moksha.html

Cyfrowa edycja albumu "Fazal Sheikh: Moksha" dostępna jest na poniższej stronie:

http://www.fazalsheikh.org/10_moksha/online_edition_en/start.php

"Listening to Avedon"

Of all Avedon's recent testimonials, none is more concise or revealing as a short cassette tape audio tour of his 1994-95 retrospective "Evidence" made for the show's last tour stop, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA). Culled from interviews with radio journalist and independent producer Connie Goldman conducted over a 25-year period beginning in 1970, the audio tour of "Evidence" gets down to business early. After spending a few minutes discussing his early stab at reportage, Avedon tackles what he has called his "serious work," the portraits. For the rest of the tape, from his Vogue portrait work through the fieldsets from In the American West (1985) and the photographs of his dying father, he boils the issues of photography down to issues of portraiture in which the politics of the image are writ into the direct experience of one-on-one relationships.

Avedon discusses photographic truth, authorship and meaning not so much as parts of a theoretical discussion but as parts of himself discovered through the process of photographing others. That's why for Avedon resolving these issues means more than winning a debate; resolution provides him a measure of individuality and the wholeness of an artistic identity. What the MIA tape makes clear is how complex and confusing individuality and identity can be for someone who tries to find them from behind a camera.





One of the earliest quotes on the audio tour maps out the difficulties Avedon will struggle with for the entire tape. After revealing that "I still use the first camera I ever had, a Rolliflex," Avedon goes on to say that new technology doesn't interest him: what does is "the person in front of me and the moment we share." Although he has since used other cameras (notably an 8x10 view camera), going on record for using the same camera he started with is code for "I'm still the same Avedon, I've never changed. I have integrity as a person and a photographer." On the other hand, describing the photographic act as a moment shared with another person adds a constantly changing cast of creative partners who bring their own individuality to the built-in integrity of Avedon's single-camera identity. The result is his challenging of the fine line between creative integrity and social interaction by insisting on having it both ways. He sees no contradiction in claiming his artistic integrity while admitting that everything he has accomplished as a creative artist depends on the participation of others.

Demanding that he be seen as an artist is nothing new for Avedon; he has spent decades fighting the label "fashion photographer." This is partly because it is important for him to claim his own identity as a photographic artist as opposed to a constantly compromised and therefore non-existent individual associated with "commercial work." In the MIA tape, Avedon bases his claim to being an artist on his "subjectivity," the notion that when we look at an Avedon photograph, whether of Dovima or Marian Anderson, we are also looking at the photographer. "I don't think that I've captured the essence of anyone that I've photographed," Avedon says. "I think I've photographed what I'm feeling myself and recognize in someone else." Like many photographers of his generation (Minor White and Robert Frank come to mind), he believes that describing one's own feelings is the goal of every serious photographer. Finding such feelings is less about self examination than about discovering them through a photographic interaction with the world and its subjects. "A portrait photographer," Avedon says, "depends on another person to complete his picture - the subject imagined - which in a sense is me." Based on the unpredictable complexity of photographic interaction, his idea of subjectivity is a complex social metaphor in which his self is inextricably intertwined with the self of his subjects and theirs with him. His 1993 publication, Autobiography, illustrates the situation perfectly: although the title suggests the story of his life, the book is filled with pictures of other people, as if he can only describe himself through his descriptions of other people...

Reszta artukułu dostępna jest na stronach serwisu "americansuburbx" (Listening to Avedon, 1995, Vince Leo):
http://www.americansuburbx.com/2009/02/theory-listening-to-avedon.html

Zapraszamy do przejrzenia albumów Richarda Avedona dostępnych w naszej ofercie:
http://www.bookoff.pl/search.php?text=richard+avedon

Philip Jones Griffiths: Vietnam Inc.

Philip Jones Griffiths

Philip Jones Griffiths, whose book Vietnam Inc. defines the meaning of photojournalism, believes the ideals of the thinking photojournalist forged in the middle of the 20th century should not be sacrificed for the dumbed down culture of the 21st. That includes Magnum. Interview by Graham Harrison.

From the depression years of the 1930s to the arrival of the roving TV cameraman in the late 1960s the photojournalist was seen as the romantic and daring reporter who sent news from the battle fronts and disaster areas of the world.

The phrase ‘famous photographer’ used in the bizzarest of circumstances today, comes from those four decades when the public looked to mass market picture magazines for still images by star photojournalists like Robert Capa to add depth to their understanding of the major news stories.


FROM PHARMACIST TO GLOBE TROTTER

Born in 1936 in the Welsh border town of Rhuddlan just as this golden age began, Philip Jones Griffiths started his photographic career at the Golden Sands Holiday Camp in Rhyl before being dispatched by his parents to study pharmacy at Liverpool University. However the young Griffiths had the sort of questioning mind that drew him back to photography, and he began part time work for the then Manchester Guardian as the final decade of the golden era of photojournalism was about to commence.

In 1959 Philip Jones Griffiths moved south to a London emerging from post war gloom where he survived with pharmacy work at Boots the Chemist in Piccadilly Circus and then with freelance photographic assignments from The Sunday Times and The Observer newspapers. It was in 1962 with The Observer that he scored his first major success.

At the time there was a brutal war in Algeria between French colonial forces and the Front de Libération Nationale or FLN. Defeated by the communist Viet Minh in 1954 the French had departed their former colonies in South East Asia effectively handing over their interests in the region to the Americans. Not without coincidence the French then faced a new liberation movement in North Africa later that same year.

By 1962 the Algerian war was in it’s end game but Griffiths had heard of the regroupement program that the French imposed on remote communities. People were placed in fortified villages and the French napalmed the surrounding countryside to create a free fire zone without sustenance for guerilla forces to survive on.

What intrigued him was that none of the photojournalists hanging around the bars and cafés of Algeirs had between them managed a single image of these camps.

Rising to the challenge the 25 year old flew to North Africa, trekked into the Atlas Mountains with a platoon of FLN soldiers, and became the first photographer to record a camp de regroupment. Delighted, The Observer rewarded Griffiths for his initiative with a full page of pictures, the first time this had ever been done by a national newspaper...

Reszta artukułu dostępna jest na stronach serwisu Photohistories (Philip Jones Griffiths, Graham Harrison):

http://www.photohistories.com/interviews/23/philip-jones-griffiths

Zapraszamy również do obejrzenia filmu o fotografie zamieszczonego na stronie agencji fotograficznej Magnum:

http://inmotion.magnumphotos.com/essay/warsgriffiths

Album "Vietnam Inc." dostępny jest w naszej księgarni:

http://www.bookoff.pl/product-pol-554-Vietnam-Inc-Miekka-Oprawa-.html

Eugene Richards's best shot

'I had to work fast - it was 30 below zero and the floor was collapsing'

http://www.bookoff.pl/search.php?text=eugene+richards

Eugene Richards's best shot: made in Corinth, North Dakota.

I'm not a religious person, but I find abandoned houses more spiritual than churches. Maybe it's because they're very quiet. When you're inside, all you can hear is the wind blowing.

This particular photograph was made in Corinth, North Dakota. The guidebook says the town once had 300 people, which is debatable, but now it's just raw wood structures and a very elderly couple called Melvyn and Maureen Wisdahl. Their house stands out because it has paint on it.

On a snowy day three years ago, with the temperature about 30 degrees below zero, I was wandering around the town and I went into this general store, which had probably been abandoned for 30 years. You could just push your way into these places, which were all full of trash and broken windows. In the back I found this door, opened it, and inside was a bedroom.

I'm not sure what went through my head, but I just thought the bed was very beautiful. I had to work fast, because after a while in that cold you can't move. The only other issue I had was trying not to go through the floor, which was almost collapsing. In North Dakota they have these deep basements, and if you went through, and you were alone in 30 below zero then, without wanting to be melodramatic, that would probably be the end.

A couple of weeks later, I went back to see the Wisdahls. They are an exceedingly educated couple who drag you inside and feed you all these Swedish cookies until you burst. Then, as I was leaving, I mentioned this bed I'd seen covered with snow. Maureen said: "That was my mom's bed." There was no irony; she just said it very casually. I think she may have been born in that bed. I know her mother certainly died in it.

• The Blue Room by Eugene Richards is published by Phaidon

• Interview by Leo Benedictus
• The Guardian, Thursday 12 February 2009
• Article history