Ever wonder who is covering a major news event? The Associated Press’ Mary Altaffer turned her cameras on her colleagues who have been working inside the Manhattan court house where Harvey Weinstein was tried.
It not very glamorous but it is very important.
Well worth reading: Alice Gregory at The New York Times’ Style Magazine takes a look at the role of Dorothea Lange in the growth of photojournalism as the Museum of Modern Art opens their second retrospective on her.
Sigh … I may have to go to New York again …
Her contemporary Ansel Adams called her pictures “both records of actuality and exquisitely sensitive emotional documents.” She was an artist under the guise of a journalist and an activist under the guise of a dispassionate civil servant, and it would be impossible to think of any of these roles today without her influence.
And this section, written about her final months:
Lange was only eating soft foods by this point and rarely ventured outside. She kept a camera around her neck, though, “for health,” and continued to take photographs — of her house, of her family.
There are many great quotes in this interview with Dawoud Bey, but this resonated deeply with me:
African-Americans in photographs have very often been viewed through a lens of social pathology. So, I wanted to respond to that kind of representation by making photographs that conveyed a deep, complex humanity.
I want there to be real sense of interiority, to go beneath the surface.
We talk about making images with intentionality quite a bit, now I’ll add interiority to the conversation.
This is becoming a trend … Getty Images photojournalist Mark Wilson walks through his image of the president’s notes.
Pay attention to his thinking behind the gear he was carrying – being prepared is key.
How we deal with families after they have been through a traumatic event is a constant conversation for us. Finding the balance between the needs of individuals and the needs of a community can be brutally hard.
We never want to intrude, we never want to add to the grief a family is experiencing but, at the same time, their story can have a powerful impact on a community. That story can both explain what has happened and help a community move forward, through healing or actions of change.
Cesar Rodriguez walks us through his coverage of the slain family in Mexico over at Time.
They were telling me that we want people to know what happened because if they don’t know, if things don’t change, their deaths will have been for nothing. So something good has to come out of this. Something powerful.
Worth a read.
I love this quote from The New York Times story on the late Ida Wyman:
Taking pictures enabled me to hear the stories of the people I photographed.
Listening is such an integral part of journalism – if we cannot listen it is incredibly difficult to see the stories unfolding in front of us. And listening is a very different act than hearing. Listening is an active state, it involves attention and intention. We listen when we are immersed in conversation, we hear without that sense of purpose.
In studying her work, that sense of purpose is there – her street photography/feature photos are nuanced and layered, they are not casual observations. They reveal something about a place. Look at the image of the men studying the newspaper in Hebrew, or the man looking into the garbage can on the pier. Those are not one-dimensional frames, they required her to actively see those scenes, to watch them evolve.
I’m pondering what the parallel phrases are for seeing now. Watching vs. seeing? Open to suggestions here.
This exchange alone makes it worh a read:
You’ve said that so much of photography is actually rooted in having experiences and not just sitting behind a camera or computer.
Yeah, this is the truth of the matter. When I grew up in photography, it was about getting on the street, experiencing events, getting in the middle of things, coming back with the goods and the experience to talk about.
It is very easy to think so much about where photographs go, so much so that we can lose sight of the magic needed during the process. If we are not immersed in the moment, we can’t fully understand and appreciate the event and that will lessen our understanding.
The Associated Press Images Blog has put up a collection of photos of AP photographers and reporters form throughout the 20th century – great fun to see how our roles and appearances have changed.
“The temperature would go down a couple of degrees because she had that nice, calming way and was nonthreatening with a ready smile,” Ms. (Nancy) Weinstock said, echoing the remarks of her colleagues on social media. “She would observe, step back a little, and she was very observant. She would see before shooting. She wasn’t one to shoot from the hip.”
Worth some time to look at her work.