Family Photography Pictures: mary ellen mark

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Wednesday, July 29, 2020

Photography art Gallery Friday Round Up - 13 June, 2014|Photography Art Definition

This week Friday Round Up features an historical theme. There are stories on two iconic American photographers who began their careers in the 1960s - Mary Ellen Mark and Danny Lyon, plus The Sievers Project (Melbourne), and a look at two massive photography archives that are now available online - the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and The Open Society Foundations. A visual feast.

Interview

Mary Ellen Mark

American photographer Mary Ellen Mark has been taking pictures for more than 50 years. In May the Stills Gallery in Sydney hosted her first solo exhibition in Australia featuring a number of images from the eighties and nineties including some shot for National Geographic in 1987 for a story on Australian Immigrants.

More recently she’s worked in Australia as a stills photographer on three of Baz Luhrmann’s films – ‘The Great Gatsby’ and ‘Moulin Rouge’ in Sydney, and ‘Australia’ in the remote town of Kununurra in Western Australia, 3,040 kilometres (1,889 miles) from Perth. I can tell by the way Mark pronounces” Kun-un-urra” that she is still savouring that quintessential Australian outback experience. Of her time with Baz and his multi-Oscar winning wife Catherine ‘CM’ Martin she says, “Great people, brilliant”.

Internationally Mark is equally renowned for her film stills as well her documentary photography and she’s managed to successfully live in both worlds without losing her visual signature. She is credited with shooting more than 50 films including ‘Tootsie,’ ‘One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest,’ ‘Apocalypse Now’ and Fellini’s ‘Satyricon’. Mark tells me these commissions, and her magazine work, have funded her personal projects, which lie at the heart of her photographic practice...(to read the full interview and see more photographs please click on the Feature Articles tab at the top of the blog).

Book:

Danny Lyon - The Seventh Dog

“The Seventh Dog” is the first retrospective monograph from American documentary photographer Danny Lyon. This book is as much a visual diary as it is a personal recollection, with images and anecdotes interwoven throughout in an intimate portrayal of what Lyon has seen over the last fifty years.

And it’s also a rollicking good read that is moved along by Lyon’s humour and his frankness. Unafraid of controversy, and throwing caution to the wind, Lyon plunged headlong into life using his camera to try and make sense of what was around him. Photography may be a lonely pursuit, as Robert Frank said, but the gems that live within the pages of The Seventh Dog could not have been taken without a single-minded focus...(to read full review and see more photographs please click on the Book Reviews tab at the top of the blog).

Exhibition: Melbourne

The Sievers Project - Group Show

Gerard Hearbst (C) Wolfgang Sievers

Considered one of the world's great industrial and architectural photographers, Wolfgang Sievers (1913-2007), a student of Bauhaus, fled Nazi Germany for Australia at the outbreak of WWII. In 1939 he opened his photographic studio in Melbourne and became one of Australia’s most renowned photographers with many of his images icons of the industrial age in this country.

Since his death in 2007, Naomi Cass the director of Melbourne’s Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP) has pondered how to combine contemporary practice with Sievers own work,the outcome of which is "The Sievers Project" in which six “early career” photo-media artists have responded to Sievers’ photographs in both direct and more esoteric styles.

The Sievers Project artists - Jane Brown, Cameron Clarke, Zoe Croggon, Therese Keogh, Phuong Ngo, and Meredith Turnbull – were given an open brief says Kyla McFarlane, Assistant Curator at CCP, who was also heavily involved in the Project. “The only remit was to respond to his work or his life or his philosophy…All responded quite respectfully, and have taken quite an interesting lateral and sometimes more direct responsive approaches”.

McFarlane says Clarke and Brown focused on some of Sievers more commercial images. Both visited various sites that Sievers had photographed including the Ford Factory and AMCOR’s Australian Paper Mills in Melbourne. Brown also visited “an old mining site in Broken Hill, which is a graveyard for machinery. There’s a certain poetic melancholy to these images. Jane prints her own work and uses interesting tones including gold. The prints are arranged in grids so you can see this mass of machinery and the abandoned nature of the place. We’ve hung Jane’s work opposite Sievers’ images and there is a real conversation between the pair”.

At a textiles plant in the Victorian country town of Wangaratta Clarke took a different approach with his response. With his idea being to capture the “theatrical drama of Sievers work, Cameron has taken portraits of the machines and the individuals,” offers McFarlane. “The workers in these photographs look so human and almost sweaty against these machines that are still in operation”.

Photo-media artist Zoe Croggon has taken Sievers’ photographs and used them underneath her collage works that are printed on aluminium. Suspended from the ceiling on wires, these two images overlap and juxtapose the athleticism of the human form against cold steel.

Phuong Ngo drew on his migrant heritage to tell a personal story about his mother and other Vietnamese women who worked as seamstresses in backyard workshops. Using the sewing machine as the lynchpin, his portraits explore the relationship between the machines and the women. McFarlane says this work is a personal homage to Ngo’s childhood. “Phuong said that when he was growing up the sewing machine’s sound was like a Vietnamese lullaby…so here he’s taken a nub of Sievers’ work and placed it within his own history”.

In addition to the more traditional photographic representations are works that feature fabric, sculpture, collage and photolithographs. Using photography and original sculpture, artist Therese Keogh chose a photograph Sievers took in Rome of The Forum on which to frame her response. McFarlane says Keogh’s approach is centred on what she’s defined as “anomalies in Sievers’ practice”. Another installation artist and designer Meredith Turnbull, has used Sievers’ portrait of designer Gerard Hearbst as inspiration. Hearbst was an immigrant like Sievers. In this portrait Hearbst is pictured waving a bolt of fabric like a flag. It is this image that Turnbull has collaged and printed onto fabric as her response to a master’s work.

The Sievers Project

Until 24 August

CCP

404 George Street

Fitzroy (Melbourne)

Open Archives:

Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has opened its archive of around 30,000 photographs for free for non-commercial use. Images date back to the early years of photography with an eclectic collection of works that provide a brilliant walk through photography's history in the US in particular. This is a goldmine for anyone interested in the photograph's journey from Daguerre to now.

Open Society Foundations Archive

TheOpen Society Foundations has also opened its archive of documentary photographs to the public. Spanning 15 years, this collection features works by more than 170 photographers. There are both renowned and lesser known photographers in the Collection with the emphasis on the work - bodies of work that address human rights abuses and investigate the human condition in times of conflict.

This is a fantastic research archive with images from many including "Antonin Kratochvil’s documentation of the nascent years of Eastern Europe’s transition from Communism; Andrew Lichtenstein’s examination of the criminal justice system in the United States; Saiful Huq Omi’s representation of the Muslim ethnic minority Rohingya living in western Burma; and Andrea Diefenbach’s photographs of Moldovan parents who have migrated to Italy to find better-paying work, and the children they’ve left behind".

Thursday, July 23, 2020

Photography art Gallery Friday Round Up - 5th December, 2014|Photography Art Definition

This week it's all about books and there's something for everyone in this round up of new publications. In fact there are so many new photography books worth talking about that Photojournalism Now will publish a second book review feature next week. Plus this week the last exhibitions for 2014 at Melbourne's Colour Factory and Sydney's 10x8 Gallery and Blackeye Gallery.

Book Reviews Feature - Mary Ellen Mark, Jennifer Blau, Dan Eckstein, Taewon Jang, Street Photography, Photoshow, First World War in Colour and Eyemazing.

Man and Beast

Photographs from Mexico and India

Mary Ellen Mark

American photographer Mary Ellen Mark has been taking pictures for more than 50 years and has managed to straddle the worlds of movie stills and documentary photography with equal success.

Like other notable photographers Mark studied painting and art history before she took a major in photojournalism; it was a light bulb moment. “Photography became an immediate love for me. I had always read books about photography and was always fascinated with great photography. But it hadn’t occurred to me that it was something I could do myself until I got to graduate school and picked up a camera in my very early twenties”.

Maharaja of Udaipur and his dog, Udaipur, India, 1996

Madonna the giraffe, Oaxaca, Mexico, 1998

Child acrobat with two children in peacock costumes, Great Royal Circus, Himmatnagar, India, 1989

Since then Mark has pursued her passion for visual storytelling with her work the subject of articles, exhibitions and books, the latest of which is Man and Beast: Photographs from Mexico and India.

“My photographs often explore the balance between man and beast – whether it’s literally a photo of a person with an animal or an underlying sense of the beast within human nature,” she says in the introduction to Man and Beast. “The photographs in this book are from two countries I love very much: India and Mexico. Both countries overwhelm my senses with their powerful imagery. They are very complex, intriguing, and inspiring….I find strong similarities between these two cultures separated by thousands of miles.”

Throughout her career Mark has focused her camera on stories that fall outside the mainstream - brothels in Bombay, street kids in Seattle, pregnant teens, circus performers - creating visual explorations that pull back the layers of the human experience.

Man and Beast is very much in this vein and features images shot in the 1960s through to more recent times, with the majority published for the first time. Here simple street scenes are paired with more formal portraits, but each carry the Mark signature where there is a sense of something slightly off balance.

The book’s beautifully reproduced black and white plates and red linen cover with gold embossed lettering are the perfect package in which to present another chapter in Mark’s remarkable career.

Man and Beast

University of Texas Press

The 50 Book

Jennifer Blau

In a world obsessed with youth and staying young, The 50 Book celebrates those women who have hit the half-century mark, sharing with the reader their wisdom, acceptance and misgivings around ageing.

Photographer Jennifer Blau’s portraits capture the sense of freedom as well as the fear that hitting the magic number of fifty induces in many, not just women. But women do have a different journey to men, and the conditioning of the female sex can be hard to shift. Many women focus on the deterioration of the outer, rather than the betterment of the inner, but Blau’s book brings the latter to the fore through short chapters that largely focus on positive affirmation.

Fifty is a number that seems to speed up the clock. All of a sudden the years that have gone before seem more visible. Lines appear, grey hairs proliferate, and skin loses its elasticity. The shell, the outer being, shows signs of wear and the face that looks back at you in the mirror can feel like a betrayal.

But turning 50 should also be a celebration of what has gone before, of the experiences that have shaped a life. Often it is a time of renewal, with many changing direction and spreading their wings with the confidence that wisdom and life experience brings. And it’s an age when you realise that time is a luxury you no longer have, every minute counts. Many embark on projects or lifestyle changes that bring renewal and a sense of greater purpose.

The 50 Book brings together all of the emotional elements of reaching this milestone in personal stories told by women of all backgrounds. It is uplifting and at the same time real, and that’s one of the things I like so much about this book. The women featured are brave enough to tell it like it is. For some turning 50 has been the most confronting experience, and for others, the most liberating. Interspersed with Blau’s sensitive portraits, are personal stories and quotes, including Blau's own story, that make the book even more accessible.

Available from the50book.com

You can buy the book at www.the50book.com

304 pages/73 images

Published by Captain Honey, Byron Bay

Horn Please: The Decorated Trucks of India

Dan Eckstein

This new book from New York’s powerHouse Books has an almost handmade feel. Its brightly coloured, thick cardboard cover and dark green on the inside front pages evokes another era which design-wise supports the book's content.

There have been many photographic books on India’s complex cultural hierarchy, but Horn Please introduces readers to a new group, India’s truck drivers. The horror stories about driving the roads of this geographically diverse sub-continent abound. Courage and a dose of fatalism are necessary to survive these roads. A book that portrays those who live on the chaotic highways and streets of India’s teeming cities, is immediately a curiosity.

In Horn Please, India’s TATA trucks are adorned with bright colours, motives, patterns and religious icons. And that’s just the exterior view. Inside the trucks have been shaped into living quarters with a place to cook and sleep on the long journeys.

“Horn Please is the mantra of the Indian Highway,” says photographer Dan Eckstein in the book’s introduction. “Some version of the phrase is painted on the back of practically every truck on the road. In a place where lanes are a mere suggestion, side-view mirrors are seldom used, and modes of transport range from ox-drawn carts to 18-wheel trucks, the ever-present horn is an essential part of driving etiquette.”

Eckstein hints at the lives these truck drivers lead on the road and the camaraderie they share. The book would have been better served by the inclusion of more text, particularly personal stories and discussion on the cargo these drivers carry. While the images are strong, they are somewhat repetitive, and text could have broken up the visual narrative. Having said that, Horn Please is visually engaging and if nothing else leaves the reader with a desire to know more, and that can’t be a bad thing.

Horn Please

powerHouse Books

Stained Ground

Taewon Jang

The photographs in Stained Ground, a new release from German publisher Hatje Cantz, leap from the pages of this exquisitely printed book. Jang’s luminescent images of industrial plants, what he calls cathedrals of the modern era, are reproduced to show their full potency. “Ominous, overwhelming and harshly lit,” this collection of images delivers an erudite visual investigation of industrial sites across the USA.

Jang, a South Korean photographer, uses nature to light his frame and his cathedrals are shot at specific times of the day – dawn, dusk, midnight – and in all seasons to create the desired effect: to create an apocalyptic mood.

People don’t feature in these images. Rather Jang chooses to use moving machinery to convey life. Here he suggests these machines are in control inviting thought around the notion of artificial intelligence and its impact on humanity.

Stained Ground features an essay After Night Falls (Lyle Rexer), which discusses the “dark photograph” and leads to the chapter on Jang’s treatment of this aesthetic. The book also includes an interview with Jang conducted by Suejin Shin – Letter to My Father: An interview with Taewon Jang, where he explains his motivation for the project shot over seven years from 2007 to 2013.

Jang says he chose to photograph in the US because of the practice of erecting new factories often alongside those they replace. This phenomenon is not seen in Korea where old factories are demolished and new ones built upon them, rather than allowing the disused site to decay. It is the American environment that allows Jang to trace time, to see the old and new together, something he says “is unimaginable in a small country like Korea”.

Stained Ground

Taewon Jang

Hatje Cantz

100 images

160pp

The World Atlas of Street Photography

Jackie Higgins

Australian Jesse Marlow’s photograph features on the cover of this weighty production from Thames and Hudson. With Susan Sontag’s ode to the urban landscape – “A landscape of voluptuous extremes” - as a catalyst for this collection, The World Atlas of Street Photography presents street photography from around the world and its sweep is comprehensive.

The Atlas is sectioned into geographical chapters with specific cities chosen as features. New York, Los Angeles and Chicago feature in the North American line up with works from the likes of Joel Meyerowitz and Bruce Gilden appearing alongside lesser-known photographers. A similar approach is taken throughout each section and the result is a rich resource that weaves older images from the last century with contemporary works to make comment on social trends and cultural mores. With a total of 640 photographs, 500 in colour, The World Atlas of Street Photography is a must-have for anyone interested in street photography.

The Street Photographer’s Manual

David Gibson

Also from Thames and Hudson is The Street Photographer’s Manual by David Gibson. This practical “how to” book features profiles on, and advice from, well known street photographers as well as project to undertake. It’s a useful book that provides insights into how certain images were crafted as well as well as discussing different styles of shooting on the street.

The World Atlas of Street Photography

The Street Photographer’s Manual

Both available from Thames and Hudson

Photoshow: Landmark exhibitions that defined the history of photography

Edited by: Alessandra Mauro

Taking a different approach to discussing the history of photography is Photoshow. In this new book from Thames & Hudson the evolution of the medium is unfurled through essays by various historians who draw on the some of the most important photographic exhibitions, such as The Family of Man. Exhibitions dating back to the 1800s are discussed alongside those of the digital age, with ‘here is new york’ nominated as “possibly the most seen exhibition in history”.

Photoshow begins in the now, with an interview with Quentin Bajac, chief curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York on the topic of curating photographs in the Internet Age. Bajac says “I think my own generation has gone beyond the view of the photograph as just a print hung on a wall…museums…should go with the evolutionary flow of practice, which today is towards ever increasing diversification and also – even if photographers are still a little reticent about it - a greater degree of immateriality”.

MoMA features heavily as expected, and there is an interesting essay on MoMA’s director of photography John Szarkowski as well as discourse on four major exhibitions. Alfred Stieglitz and 291 are also the subject of a chapter, which reminds us of Stieglitz’ passion and commitment to have the photograph treated as a genuine work of art.

Crystal Palace, built to house London’s Great Exhibition of 1851, lithograph. © Science Photo Library/Contrasto

Exhibition poster for Film und Foto, Stuttgart,1929. © gift of The Lauder Foundation, Leonard and Evelyn Lauder Fund/MoMA/Scala

Edward Steichen with the maquette for The Family of Man. © Wayne Miller/Magnum Photos

The exhibition here is new york, Prince street, New york, 2001

Editor Mauro, who is the artistic director of Forma Foundation for Photography in Milan, also includes references to exhibitions in Europe with chapters on the 1891 Vienna International Exhibition of Artistic Photography and Robert Delpire and the Centre National de la Photographie in Paris.

Photoshow is a welcome addition to the conversation and a great reference book that shows in written word and pictures how the staging of photographic exhibitions also continues to evolve. Available from: Thames and Hudson

In Brief:

The First World War in Colour

Peter Walther

Published by: Taschen

This is another first class book from Taschen featuring a large number of photographs that have not been published previously. It’s weighted toward the more technically minded, with in depth discussion on the photographic techniques used in the early colour days and the practitioners. However even if you are not that interested in the chemistry, there is significant historical value in this book also. Available fromTaschen

German Trench Canteen

Soldiers pose in concrete trench

British Ambulance

Jules Gervais-Courtellemont

British Tank

The American Committee for Devastated France

A Favourite - Eyemazing: The New Collectible Art Photography

Eyemazing Susan

Published by: Thames & Hudson

Eyemazing Susan is the nom de plume of Susan Zadeh (pictured below), the founder of Eyemazing magazine, which began in 2003. This book is a compilation of works that have appeared in the magazine over the past decade to 2013 and it is one of my favourite photographic art books.

Eyemazing Susan

With 423 colour illustrations Eyemazing is an almost overwhelming book in size and scope, but it is one that you can keep dipping in to, to find inspiration in the boundary-breaking imagery.

Available from:Thames and Hudson

Exhibitions:

Melbourne

Carlo Chechi - Colour & Harmony

An exploration of 19th Century gum bichromate printing

Using ancient photograph print techniques, Italian photographer Carlo Chechi's exhibition, Colour & Harmony, presents the lives of circus performers in Florence in a series of portraits. Chechi says he chose to use the gum bichromate technique because it is imperfect.

“I love imperfection. I mean, imperfection is what gives you uniqueness. It allows you to be different. It is what makes us human beings. Merging together a “surreal” story and a “surreal” technique, I thought it would be interesting! Giving uniqueness to a unique story with a unique (because of its imperfection) technique.”

Until 31 January

Colour Factory

409-429 Gore Street

Fitzroy

Closed 19 December to 12 January 2015

Sydney

Group Show - 10x8 Gallery

This is the last show for 10 x 8 Gallery this year and features Eirini Alligiannis, Dylan Coombe, Michael Corridore, Simone Darcy, Michael Fairbairn, Keiko Goto, Jamie Hladky, Ruth Maddison, Peter Morgan, Zorica Purlija, Naomi Riddle, George Shaw, Talia Smith, Julie Sundbeg, Juno Gemes and Aku Kadago.

10x8 Gallery

Until 24 December

Level 3, Central, 28 Broadway,

Chippendale

Graham Shearer - Eau

Blackeye Gallery

When a photographer uses the movement of water and light the effect can be quite surreal. Such is the case with Graham Shearer's latest series of underwater images taken recently in Western Australia. Here sunlight and the ripple of the water create patterns that cover bare skin like tribal markings and turn watery backgrounds into molten metal. Shearer is one of Australia's most renowned advertising and fashion photographers. He is credited with helping to launch the careers of the likes of Elle Macpherson and some of his iconic fashion images are also included in this show.

Until 24 December

Blackeye Gallery

3/138 Darlinghurst Road,

Darlinghurst