20th century social documentary, photojournalism, and street photography
Margaret Bourke White
This picture of Life Magazine's photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White atop the Chrysler Building was taken by her dark room assistant Oscar Graubner. She was America's first accredited woman photographer in WWII, and the first authorized to fly on a combat mission. She was one of the first to depict the death camps, and later became the last person to interview Gandhi, six hours before he was slain. Her hundreds of thousands of photos are about adventure, sensitivity, composition and courage.
William Eggleston
Untitled, Around 1965, he started to use color film, and his range expanded. This teenage boy is 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.
Walker Evans
Walker Evans. "A Graveyard and Steel Mill in Bethlehem", Pennsylvania. 1935 -This shows an objective piece of photography during the Great Depression. He foregrounds Christian symbolism, emphasis is on death, lack of human life because the landscape is crowded, but deserted of people. Matching of forms creates a strong formal composition: grave markers match with posts on the porch, and telegraph wires above, Old way (represented by the grave markers) is overshadowed by the new (telegraph and factory smoke stacks in the distance), Sense of claustrophobia; the place seems to be a closed circuit: you live, work and die within the same few yards.
Weegee
Weegee was also a crime photographer.
photo essay
According to Photospeak, this is a specific type of European and American photojournalism characterized by a close association between text and a group of photographs, often a narrative sequence, consequence on a given subject.
halftone
According to the Social photography pdf, A halftone is a printable version of a photograph. Halftones convert the various tints or shades that make up the original image into very small dots. To get a close-up look at how the process works, you take a magnifying glass and look closely at any of the photographs in a magazine or a newspaper and then see that they are half tones. Under magnification the printed photograph breaks down into a bewildering conglomeration of dots.
"New Documents"
New Documents was an influential documentary photography exhibition at Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1967, curated by John Szarkowski. It featured photographs by Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand and is said to have "represented a shift in emphasis" and "identified a new direction in photography: pictures that seemed to have a casual, snapshot-like look and subject matter so apparently ordinary that it was hard to categorize"
Margaret Bourke
This is part of Life magazine issue by Margaret Bourke. Margaret Bourke-White documented the construction of the Fort Peck Dam on the Missouri river in Montana for the first issue of Life magazine. Bourke -White turned her camera on the small towns, such as New Deal, which housed the construction workers. The photographs she produced revealed life in the 'frontier ' town lifestyle, not unlike the West of the Gold Rush days .
Walker Evans
This photograph could be by Walker Evans as well because of his photo series of the FDA and documenting the suffering during the great depression. A big element in this photo that also kind of reminds me of the poster by Lewis Hine are the advertisements on the wall and how ironic that there were still companies that were struggling during the great depression and then shows a little boy possibly living in a poor rural environment. This shows a contrast between rural and possible urban.
Jacob Riis
"5 Cents a Night Flop House," from How the Other Half Lives, Gelatin silver print, 1889. (Social documentary) part of How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York published in 1890. -Jacob Riis began documentary not as a photographer but simply as documentarian and a journalist. He began to take photos around the end of the economic depression 1887 and after. In this photo, he shows life in and around tenements in which the immigrants and the poor were packed. This photo was taken in the dark to show the living/sleep conditions in which they were in. In result of that, Riis only had to take one shot because of the white smoke the magnesium flash powder made in the tenements. His work did not have a artistic objective but to throw light (literally and metaphorically) into the obscure areas of society.
Cartier Bresson
"Au Bord de la Marne" 1937. (Photojournalism) This photo shows languorous workers in Juvisny spending a lazy afternoon on the bank of River Marne. According to the pdf the prof gave us, "In fact, it was one of the photos Cartier-Bresson took during his first (and last) salaried job with the Parisian leftwing newspaper, Ce Soir in 1937. The assignment was for a campaign to win more vacation time for workers, and his editors hated the self-indulgent poses (picnic baskets, wines and all that) and the final spread on the story didn't use the photo. The photo has been since been compared to paintings by Degas and Seurat. Cartier-Bresson who never named any of his photos would have been content with one title given by critics, Sunday on the Banks of Marne."
Jacob Riis
"Bandit's Roost" by Jacob Riis, New York, 1888, Gelatin silver print. (Social photography) also part of How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York published in 1890. -Also documents the life of the immigrants and the poor that lived in the slums of New york city in the 1880s. Riis emphasized the dehumanizing conditions of New York's slums and exposed them to New York's upper and middle class.
Walker Evans
"Bud Fields & His Family" by walker evans (Documentary photography). This photo depicts what the FSA was about and a family struggling during the depression. This also depicts the living conditions that this family was a part of in the rural environment. In this photograph, he has assembled a poor family. They seem somewhat reserved (except the 2nd youngest) before the photographer. No matter how impenetrable their stares, their bare feet, thin limbs, filthy clothing, and various states of dress and undress are a wealth of information about this family's situation. Part of the irony here is that there are photographs pinned to the wall behind, apparently showing life in a more pleasant time, perhaps, when they sat more gladly before a photographer.
Lewis Hine
"Making Human Junk poster", date unknown, Lewis Hine. According to http://www.morningsonmaplestreet.com/royhammett1.html, Hine returned to this theme in his poster, "Making Human Junk," which bitterly satirized the claim that underlies most advertising - that industry transforms the material world into valuable products that make our lives richer and better. He showed how children who were "Good Material at First" entered the factories and became a "product" - "Human Junk" with "No Future and Low Wages." As his "Making Human Junk" poster shows, Hine used photography to break through the façade of advertising to show the destructive "pathological" side of the industrial process. He claimed in his 1909 speech on "Social Photography" that the photographer could transport his audience into the children's work environments by showing actual working conditions in vivid, memorable pictures that have emotional appeal - sometimes accompanied by appropriate written texts. The photograph of an adolescent, a weed-like youth, who has been doffing for eight years in a mill carries its own lesson...Whether it be a painting or a photograph, the picture is a symbol that brings one immediately into close touch with reality.
Dorothea Lange
"Migrant Mother and Children", Nipomo, CA. -Lang worked, like most FSA photographers, in various states, but her home base was in California. She had had a portrait studio in San Francisco. She was dismayed by the depression bread lines and general poverty, and felt moved to photograph them. She first exhibited such photographs at an f/64 member gallery in Oakland, California. A UC Berkeley professor saw them, and asked to use them in a publication on agricultural labor in the state. That report was seen by Stryker, who then invited her to join the project. This image of a Dust Bowl refugee mother and two of her children in California is one of the most famous FSA images ever made. Lange had a knack for getting close to her subjects, by carefully approaching them, speaking with them, and shooting all the while (if they allowed). She took six photos to finally arrive at this one. The first, at a distance, shows a tent that the family is sheltered beneath. There seem to be 7 members of the family, however in the final "good" image there are only three. Part of the poignancy of this image is the far away gaze of the gaunt mother who holds an infant in her lap, while two of her children turn their heads from the camera. Their body language seems to speak the shame and despair that the mother tries hard to keep at bay. That they mirror each other gives the photograph a strong sense of symmetry, which makes it similar to iconic painting. Indeed, it is composed very much like an image of the Madonna and Child, with mourning angels by her side. We respond strongly to this image also because we see how little comfort she could provide for her children. Her records of the conversation said that the family had been feeding on vegetable scraps (the had some employment on a pea farm) and small birds that they had hunted.
Weegee
"The First Murder" by weegee, Brooklyn, New York, United States, negative October 9, 1941; print about 1950, Gelatin silver print. -According to the Getty Museum
Margaret Bourke White
"The Louisville Flood", 1937, printed c. 1970, Gelatin silver print. According to the Whitney Museum of America, In January 1937, the swollen banks of the Ohio River flooded Louisville, Kentucky, and its surrounding areas. With one hour's notice, photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White caught the next plane to Louisville. She photographed the city from makeshift rafts, recording one of the largest natural disasters in American history for Life magazine, where she was a staff photographer. The Louisville Flood shows African-Americans lined up outside a flood relief agency. In striking contrast to their grim faces, the billboard for the National Association of Manufacturers above them depicts a smiling white family of four riding in a car, under a banner reading "World's Highest Standard of Living. There's no way like the American Way." As a powerful depiction of the gap between the propagandist representation of American life and the economic hardship faced by minorities and the poor, Bourke-White's image has had a long afterlife in the history of photography. Its subsequent popularity as an illustration of chronic poverty and inequality was somewhat misleading, however. The photograph's subjects were actually on line for food provided by a temporary relief agency; they had come from an area of the city that had been especially damaged by the flood.
Paul Strand
"Wall Street" by Paul Strand, 1915, Platinum palladium print. According to the Philedelphia Museum of Art, this photo depicts a scene of everyday life in Manhattan's Financial District. Workers are seen walking past the J.P. Morgan building in New York City on the famous Wall Street, of which the photograph takes its name. The photograph is famous for its reliance on the sharpness and contrast of the shapes and angles, created by the building and the workers, that lead to its abstraction. This photograph is considered to be one of Strand's most famous works and an example of his change from pictorialism to straight photography. Strand moved from the posed to portraying the purity of the subjects. It is one of several images that stand as marks of the turn to modernism in photography.
Eugene Smith
(Photojournalism) These series of photos were a part of a story headline in Life Magazine 1948. The largest photo is USA. Colorado. 1948. Dr. CERIANI with Lee Marie Wheatly. These photos depicts an incident of a two and a half year old child who needed emergency treatment after having been kicked in the head by a horse. Dr. Ernest Guy CERIANI, a country doctor (aged 32), takes care of all the people in the town of Kremmling and in the 400 miles surrounding the town.
Eugene Smith
(Photojournalism) This is a photo taken during World War II. Marine drinking from his canteen during Battle of Saipan, 1944 by W. Eugene Smith
Diane Arbus
(Street photography) Diane Arbus' Child With a Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, 1962. Norman Mailer was quoted in 1971, the year that Ms. Arbus took her own life, as saying "Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child." This also reminds me of Typological photography. Diane Arbus was known for her photographs of outsiders and people on the fringes of society. She often shot with a Rolleiflex medium format twin-lens reflex that provided a square aspect ratio and a waist-level viewfinder. The viewfinder allowed Arbus to connect with her subjects in ways that a standard eye-level viewfinder did not.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
A photojournalist, arguably the last century's greatest photographer, had this photo in Time magazine as "The Photo of the Century". Henri Cartier-Bresson also gave the world the jewels of the street photography, most famous among which was this 1932 picture, "Derriere la Gare Saint-Lazare." As New York Times remembered, "Cartier-Bresson brings to his image layer on layer of fresh and uncanny detail: the figure of a leaping dancer on a pair of posters on a wall behind the man mirrors him and his reflection in the water; the rippling circles made by the ladder echo circular bands of discarded metal debris; another poster, advertising a performer named Railowsky, puns with the railway station and the ladder, which, flat, resembles a railroad track."
"Death of a Loyalist Soldier"
Also by Robert Capa. SPAIN. Cordoba front. September, 1936, Gelatin silver print. Death of a loyalist militiaman. (Photojournalism, Documentary) According to the met museum, this depicts the death of a Republican, specifically an Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth (FIJL) soldier, during the Spanish Civil War. The soldier in the photograph was later claimed to be the anarchist militiaman Federico Borrell García. The Falling Soldier appears to capture a Republican soldier at the very moment of death. The soldier is shown collapsing backward after being fatally shot in head, with his rifle slipping out of his right hand. The pictured soldier is dressed in civilian clothing, but is wearing a leather cartridge belt.
Roy Stryker
An American economist, government official, and photographer. He is most famous for heading the Information Division of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) during the Great Depression and launching the documentary photography movement of the FSA.
Gary Winogrand
Central Park Zoo, New York, 1967, Gelatin silver print. - According to the website you linked us to his photography is described as this: "The ability to produce pictures richly complex in their description would seem to be intrinsic to photography; indeed, this characteristic might almost be considered a simple fact of the medium. Nevertheless, much of the best energy of photographers during the past seventy years has been dedicated to the task of thinning out the rank growth of information that the camera impartially records if left to its own devices, in favor of pictures which have been --- for lack of a better word --- simpler. This has been achieved in many ways: by printing techniques that have allowed radical manipulation, by soft-focus lenses, stage lighting, high-contrast negatives, exaggerated grain, corrective filters, or worm's- or bird's-eye perspectives; by photographing details close up, or two-dimensional subjects (such as old walls); or simply by printing the picture very dark or very light. Stated this baldly these various experiments sound less interesting and less productive (and simpler) than they were in historical fact. In practice the struggle for visual coherence is continuous; when one problem is solved, a more difficult one rises in its place. -Here you can really sense a ideal diversity.
Robert Frank
Charleston, South Carolina, 1955 gelatin silver print -According to http://theamericansattheackland.web.unc.edu/charleston-sc/, standing on the sidewalk, a black woman holds a white child in Robert Frank's photograph. The photograph is a clear, black and white picture similar to the other photographs in Frank's collection. The woman in the picture is slightly older than a middle-aged woman. She is dressed in a clean, white outfit that seems to be a uniform. The baby she is holding is also wearing a white outfit. The background of the picture is blurred so that the woman and the baby are the most important part of the photograph. The woman is also wearing glasses and earrings and is looking straightforward so that the photograph only captures half of her face. The baby's whole face can be seen and seems to be very calm and content. The woman's demeanor also seems very complacent. They seem to be waiting for something. Because we know that this picture was taken in the 1950s, we can assume that the woman is the baby's hired nanny. The camera is close to the woman and child and on the same level as them so that to a viewer of the photograph, it could seem as if one is standing there with the woman and child.
William Eggleston
Color photography has its own place today in museums, exhibitions, and the art market. In 2006 Sotheby's auctioned a work by German photographer Andreas Gursky for more than two million dollars. The medium has been booming since the 1980s, even though a decade earlier it was still not really an acknowledged art form. Until well into the 1970s, the only photographs that were actually collected and exhibited were in black-and-white. The reluctance to accept color photography was mainly due to conservation reasons, since the pigmentation in early color photographs was highly unstable. Even more difficult to overcome was the aesthetic prejudice against color photography, since it was widely used by many amateurs, as well as by professional journalists, advertisers, mass media, and the entertainment industry. Recognition of color photography as an art form is a cultural phenomenon, as well as the result of a process of aesthetic emancipation, which began in the 1970s in the United States, and progressed so rapidly that just a decade later, the difference between color and black-and-white photography began to seem obsolete. Strictly speaking, therefore, the history of color photography only goes back to the 1980s—after that, it disappears in the history of photography. A turning point in the history of color photography was the exhibition Photographs by William Eggleston at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1976. Eggleston's (*1939) motifs came from different places in the Mississippi Delta, very close to his home town of Memphis, Tennessee. He took pictures of friends and acquaintances, cemeteries, children from the suburbs, parked cars, garbage dumps, fields, city buildings, everyday interiors, and apparently trivial snapshots. One of the most famous of these photos is Greenwood, Mississippi, also known asRed Ceiling. Taken in 1973, it features a naked light bulb and a few pipes in front of a background comprised of the ceiling of a room, painted red. "Memphis," a photograph from about 1969, by William Eggleston. - Thirty years ago, photography was art only 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, snapshot-like photographs at the august Museum of Modern Art, critics squawked.
magnesium flash
Device used in photography producing a flash of artificial light (typically 1/1000 to 1/200 of a second) at a color temperature of about 5500 K to help illuminate a scene. A major purpose of a flash is to illuminate a dark scene. In the device, when the light went off, flash powder would go off, a mixture of magnesium powder and potassium chlorate, introduced by its German inventors Adolf Miethe and Johannes Gaedicke in 1887.
dye transfer print
Dye transfer is a continuous-tone color photographic printing process. Photographic prints are called continuous tone images. A continuous tone image is so highly detailed it may be made up of hundreds of subtle, almost indistinguishable, shades. Even a black-and-white photograph may contain as many as 256 tints of gray.
FSA
Farm Security Administration-The FSA stressed "rural rehabilitation" efforts to improve the lifestyle of sharecroppers, tenants, very poor landowning farmers, and a program to purchase submarginal land owned by poor farmers and resettle them in group farms on land more suitable for efficient farming. FSA photographers documented life during the Depression. During the Great Depression in the US, the Government's New Deal project called the Farm Security Administration (FSA) was an important force in the world of photography. The organization's leader, Roy Stryker (not himself a photographer) headed up the historical division of the FSA, and hired photographers to document the situation of the mostly rural poor. This US Government sponsorship created what might be called a veritable renaissance of social documentary photography. The photographs are all available online (follow link to FSA above) through the Library of Congress--though their sheer number (over 70,000) is daunting. The FSA was instrumental in bringing the realities of the Dust Bowl refugees and other sufferers of the troubled times to the wealthier public eye. The group of photographers continued to document life during wartime, though the FSA was formally dissolved at that time.
Gary Winogrand
Garry Winogrand, 'Los Angeles, 1969 -According to http://www.vam.ac.uk/users/node/6664, this image, like much of Winogrand's best work, is highly disquieting. Typically, Winogrand has used a wide-angle lens, capturing the people in detail and also much of their surroundings. He has also tilted the camera (which was not done arbitrarily) which further distorts the scene. Without the figure in the wheelchair it would be simply one of Winogrand's many images of women on the street. The extraordinary refraction of light in the centre of the image silhouettes the women's legs. The centrality of their legs (and their prettiness and sexuality by connotation) is emphasised by the long shadows they cast. The women look towards the man slumped in the wheelchair, a begging cup between his knees, and their momentary glance becomes the central activity of the image. The women's sexuality, youth and mobility are contrasted with the man's poverty and immobility. The position of the camera places the viewer at street level, giving us a sense of the immediacy of the scene and our relationship to it. Winogrand would have strongly denied the notion that he used photography to illustrate his own perspective of the world - rather that he discovered the existence of unanticipated perspectives - through experiment, play of intuition and luck. The fact, however, that Winogrand clearly understood photography's ability to reconstruct the real world in a meaningful way is perhaps proof that the images he selected were describing something meaningful to him.
"Women are Beautiful"
Gary Winogrand-Women are Beautiful features eighty-five photographs of young adult women, typically composed to emphasize their breasts and backsides.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Henri Cartier-Bresson, himself once a German prisoner-of-war, took the photo between 21 April and 2 July 1945, between the American occupation of the city and the arrival of their Russian replacements. "Exposing of A Gestapo Informer" depicts Dessau, at a camp of displaced persons waiting for repatriation, a Gestapo informer who had pretended to be a refugee is discovered and exposed by a camp inmate. Cartier-Bresson draws the audience right into the middle of that anguished circle of the formerly wronged and the abused.
"How the Other Half Lives"
How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (1890) was an early publication of photojournalism by Jacob Riis, documenting squalid living conditions in New York City slums in the 1880s. It served as a basis for future "muckraking" journalism by exposing the slums to New York City's upper and middle classes.
Diane Arbus
Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967 -The only result I got for this photo is that it was about Identical twins rather than triplets. Identical Twins depicts two young twin sisters, Cathleen and Colleen Wade, standing side by side in matching corduroy dresses, white tights, and white headbands in their dark hair. Both stare into the camera, one slightly smiles and the other slightly frowns. The photo has been said to sum up Arbus' vision. Biographer Patricia Bosworth said, "She was involved in the question of identity. Who am I and who are you? The twin image expresses the crux of that vision: normality in freakishness and the freakishness in normality.
Card Set Instructions: Fill in the blank cards with good definitions, being sure to remark the historical significance of the terms and names. Image cards WITH photographer names (or title) should have work's title (or name of photographer) , or significance of the particular photo or kind of photo that this one represents, within the history of its genre (social documentary, photojournalism or street photography). A title alone (exhibition or book or photograph) should should explain what it refers to, and why it is important.
If no photographer is listed for an image, then this is a practice for an "unknown" on the text. fill in the opposite card with: an educated guess at photographer, date( to the decade), and give 4 excellent points/ reasons for your attribution based on image characteristics and subject matter. And one general statement of why this work would be historically significant (the context, place in photo history, etc.)
the Leica
Intended as a compact camera for landscape photography, particularly during mountain trips, the Leica was the first practical 35 mm camera that used standard cinema 35 mm film. The Leica transports the film horizontally, extending the frame size to 24×36 mm, with a 2:3 aspect ratio, instead of the 18×24 mm of cinema cameras which transport the film vertically.
Jacob Riis
Judging by how similar the photo looks to "5 Cents a Night Flop House," I think it's by Riis because how similar the tones are and the conditions that the people are in in terms of subject matter. I think it was taken around the late 1880s when the publication of How the Other Half Lives was published. You can get a sense of the dirtiness and dark times that the people were going through by living in the slums. There are many elements in the photo that contribute to the idea of them living in the slums or the photo depicting that idea: the environment. You can see the wall paper is ripped, the instrument in which the man is sitting on seems damaged, the woman on the far left is wearing cloths that resembles just old rags, and the lady in the far right resembles the same clothing does not seem to look clean. Another idea is the facial expressions that the man and the woman have: scared, worrisome, and confused. The environment that they are in though does not resemble a house but a basement perhaps?
Robert Capa
On 3 December 1938 Picture Post introduced 'The Greatest War Photographer in the World: Robert Capa' with a spread of 26 photographs taken during the Spanish Civil War. But the 'greatest war photographer' hated war. Born Andre Friedmann to Jewish parents in Budapest in 1913, he studied political science at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik in Berlin. Driven out of the country by the threat of a Nazi regime, he settled in Paris in 1933. This photo is named FRANCE. 1944. Normanduy. Omaha Beach. The first wave of American troops lands at dawn.
Robert Frank
Parade—Hoboken, New Jersey, 1955 -During the early 1950s, Robert Frank applied to the Guggenheim Foundation for funding to record "what one naturalized American finds to see in the United States that signifies the kind of civilization born here and spreading elsewhere...things that are there anywhere and everywhere—easily found, not easily selected and interpreted." Awarded two grants, he struck out across the country in a style similar to that of the Beat Generation writers of the time: spontaneously and without a set plan. The resulting photographs, published in the United States as The Americans in 1959, are a raw and insightful consideration of a country in transition, revealing the uncertainty of post-World War II American culture. The sense of disquiet that overwhelms his subjects suggests cracks in the veneer of hope and optimism that allegedly defined the postwar era.
Speed Graphic
Produced by Graflex in Rochester, New York, the Speed Graphic is commonly called the most famous press camera.
Robert Frank
ROBERT FRANK American, born Switzerland, 1924 Trolley, New Orleans, from the series "The Americans"1955, Gelatin silver print -Frank presented an unromanticized portrait of a nation that was rapidly changing. He recognized various aspects of American life and society, in particular the "car culture" evolving around a new system of interstate highways. This photograph of a streetcar in New Orleans reveals social tensions rooted in the South in the mid-1950s, expressed by the hierarchical placement of whites, blacks, men, women, and children. Trolley, New Orleans was used as the cover for several early editions of The Americans, demonstrating the significance of this image to Frank.
Rolleiflex
The "Rolleiflex" name is most commonly used to refer to Rollei's premier line of medium format twin lens reflex (TLR) cameras. The Rolleiflex TLR film cameras were notable for their exceptional build quality, compact size, modest weight, superior optics, durable, simple, reliable mechanics and bright viewfinders.
"Family of Man"
The Family of Man, 1955 was composed of 503 photographs grouped thematically around subjects pertinent to all cultures, such as love, children, and death. According to the MOMA, The Family of Man was an ambitious[1] photography exhibition curated by Edward Steichen, the director of the Museum of Modern Art's (MOMA) Department of Photography. It was first shown in 1955 from January 24 to May 8 at the New York MOMA, then toured the world for eight years, making stops in thirty-seven countries on six continents. More than 9 million people viewed the exhibit. The photographs included in the exhibition focus on the commonalities that bind people and cultures around the world and the exhibition itself served as an expression of humanism in the decade following World War II.
Magnum Photo
The only result I get for this is according to wikipedia, it is an international photographic cooperative owned by its photographer-members, with offices in New York, Paris, London and Tokyo. According to co-founder Henri Cartier-Bresson, "Magnum is a community of thought, a shared human quality, a curiosity about what is going on in the world, a respect for what is going on and a desire to transcribe it visually."
Weegee
Weegee, born Usher Fellig on June 12, 1899 in the town of Lemburg (now in Ukraine), first worked as a photographer at age fourteen, three years after his family immigrated to the United States, where his first name was changed to the more American-sounding Arthur. Self-taught, he held many other photography-related jobs before gaining regular employment at a photography studio in lower Manhattan in 1918. Weegee's photographic oeuvre is unusual in that it was successful in the popular media and respected by the fine-art community during his lifetime. His photographs' ability to navigate between these two realms comes from the strong emotional connection forged between the viewer and the characters in his photographs, as well as from Weegee's skill at choosing the most telling and significant moments of the events he photographed. -depicts a transvestite
"William Eggleston's Guide"
William Eggleston's Guide was the first one-man show of color photographs ever presented at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Museum's first publication of color photography. The reception was divided and passionate. The book and show unabashedly forced the art world to deal with color photography, a medium scarcely taken seriously at the time, and with the vernacular content of a body of photographs that could have been but definitely weren't some average American's Instamatic pictures from the family album. These photographs heralded a new mastery of the use of color as an integral element of photographic composition. The photo above makes the cover of this book.
