2The Passionate Photo Colorizers Who Are Humanizing the Past
last week, a striking image circulated online: a grainy triptych of registration photos of a 14-year-old Auschwitz prisoner named Czesława Kwoka. Auschwitz’s prisoner photos were all shot in black-and-white, but this one is rendered in soft color that makes each detail — from the red triangle on her uniform to the crimson dried blood on her lower lip — that much more jarringly lifelike. Marina Amaral, the 23-year-old Brazilian artist who meticulously colorized the image nearly three-quarters of a century after the photograph was first taken, released the colorized version on her blog in 2016 for Holocaust Remembrance Day. “I wanted to give Czeslawa the opportunity to tell her story, which is the story of so many other victims,” Amaral says. “I wanted to emphasize that they were not numbers or statistics, they were real human beings.”
3Capturing Photos of Corporate Office Life in 1970s America
When Susan Ressler returned home from photographing a Native American community in northern Canada, something didn’t sit well. She had been there for three months in 1973 with an anthropologist, following families as they battled alcoholism and poverty. She had dreamed of becoming a documentary photographer like Dorothea Lange, but her time in Canada left her questioning her privileged status as a photographer.
“Here I was photographing these impoverished people and they didn’t have any sense of where I was coming from and what I might do with those photographs, how it might affect them,” she said. “I started thinking about how much documentary photography is from a position of looking down on somebody who has less power.”
4Helena Georgiou: Clever Minimalism in Street Photography
Minimalism in photography may seem easy to achieve in theory. But, if there’s anything our previous features on this visual style have proven, it’s that the most effective and compelling results require some clever thinking. It’s not simply about putting a singular subject against a plain background, as Cyprus-based photographer and digital artist Helena Georgiou demonstrates in her brilliant minimalist photography.
5Peter Funch Sees the Patterns in the People on the Street
He is unaware he’s being photographed. The unposed portrait has been made in bright sunshine on a busy street, and we can see other people, blurred, behind him. The man is tanned, with a head of thinning white hair and a short white goatee. His collared shirt is pale, striped and open at the neck. He has rosebud lips and somewhat worried brows that make him appear lost in thought or on the verge of making a decision. Out of the flux of the street, a unique event has been preserved: this man, this moment, this mien.
Now look at another portrait. It’s the same man. Placed side by side with the first portrait, it immediately raises new questions. The look is almost the same: the tanned face, the small mouth, the dark, slightly furrowed brows. With his narrowed eyes, he seems a bit more preoccupied. His white goatee is fuller and more neatly shaped, giving him the debonair look of a knight in a Renaissance painting. In this second portrait, the man is all buttoned up, and he wears an ocher bow tie. Behind him this time is a different crowd, and instead of the taxi seen in the first picture, there is an armored truck.
6Sony World Photo Awards 2018: Winners Announced
Kargily girl from Ladakh-Kashmir carrying bread for her family at early morning.
Following 320,000 submissions from more than 200 countries and territories, the winners of the Sony World Photo Awards 2018 have been announced.After a record-breaking number of entries, the judges have revealed the 10 winners of the Open Awards, and 70 winners of the National Awards. The photographers will receive equipment from Sony and the winners of the Open Awards will go on to find out the overall winner on April 19 with a prize of $5,000 on offer.
Reflecting the global nature of the competition, the diversity of the photographs is striking. Winners range from intimate portraits, digital composites, stunning landscapes, and remarkable wildlife photographs. You can see some of my favorites below but be sure to check out galleries of all of the winners at the Sony World Photo Awards website. Alternatively, you can see them on display at Somerset House, London between April 20 and May 6.
