2How Women Artists in Victorian England Pushed Photography Forward
Long marginalized from the mainstream art world, female artists have often found their voices in new mediums. Performance art, for example, gave the likes of Yoko Ono, Diane Torr, and Valie Export room to make a new form of art with their bodies, unencumbered by the male centrism of mediums such as painting and sculpture. When feminist artists began documenting their performances, they helped spur the development of video art.
Earlier, in the 19th century, when photography was considered outside the remit of fine art, women found fertile ground for making their mark in the new medium. “Unlike the gun, the racquet and the oar, the camera offers a field where women can compete with men upon equal terms,” wrote Clarence Moore, rather patronizingly, in an 1893 Cosmopolitan article. Photography didn’t require academic training; in theory, it could be picked up from popular manuals. Overlooked as painters for centuries, women found an art form they could shape—and the result was several bodies of work that feel light-years ahead of photography produced by many men of the same era.
3NOW OPEN FOR ENTRIES: 2019 Sony World Photography Awards
We are delighted to invite all photographers to enter the 2019 Sony World Photography Awards. Celebrating the finest contemporary photography from the past year, the Awards are FREE to enter and offer amazing prizes, vast exposure, visibility, and opportunities to photographers worldwide.
CHOOSE BETWEEN FOUR COMPETITIONS
Professional – outstanding bodies of work between 5-10 images across ten categories
Open -rewarding the world’s best single images across ten categories
Youth -a single brief for emerging talent aged 12-19
Student – for photography students across the globe
INCREDIBLE PRIZES AND EXPOSURE
All category winners of the Professional, Open, Youth and Student competitions will receive digital imaging equipment from Sony. In addition, cash prizes of $25,000 (USD) will be presented to the Photographer of the Year and $5,000 (USD) to the Open Photographer of the Year.
All winning and shortlisted photographers will be exhibited at the annual Sony World Photography Awards Exhibition in London and will then be toured internationally. The winning images will also be published in the annual Awards’ book.
It’s not often you are sent a set of pictures that make you gasp, especially ones taken decades ago. Yet here they are, beautiful black and white pictures that have remained hidden, buried in a loft waiting to be brought out into the light.
These pictures were taken by John Turner, a property manager based in the centre of London, and were recently unearthed by his daughter and her husband, Liz and Martin Carroll.
Following John Turner’s death in 1987 a suitcase was passed to them by his widow, Betty. A quick glance revealed family photos and other pictures taken for his camera club, and it was consigned to the loft for 30 odd years.
William Eggleston has imagined that he shoots photographs from the vantage point of an insect, a baby, or a rifle—anything to avoid feeling as if he were doing it with his own eyes or, God forbid, taking a picture that looks like one he might have already taken:
Humans make pictures which tend to be about five feet above the ground looking out horizontally. I like very fast flying insects moving all over and I wonder what their view is from moment to moment. I have made a few pictures which show that physical viewpoint.
6Beautiful Life Of Amsterdam In The 1950s Taken By Kees Scherer
Amsterdam, beautiful city built on pilings. An inexhaustible source of subject matter for innumerable photographers. Not that it’s such a megalomaniac capital – it’s more of a village with urban traditions. But it’s that smallness which often provides photography with the impact and attention it deserves.
Kees Scherer (1920-1993) was born in the Amsterdam working-class district called ‘de Jordaan’. Shortly after WWII, he began working as a freelance photographer and reached the pinnacle of photojournalism with high-profile reports about the flood disaster in the province of Zeeland (1953) and the Hungarian uprising (1956).
Scherer initiated World Press Photo in 1955 with Bram Wisman. In addition to his extensive work in colour, Scherer’s early work in black and white has also been receiving increasing attention in recent years. He depicted his favourite cities in exhaustive detail, namely Paris, New York, and especially Amsterdam.
