1Picture of the Week

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2Rare Color Photos of D-Day

It was part of Operation Overlord and codenamed Operation Neptune, but we know it as D-Day. On June 6, 1944, more than 156,000 Allied troops launched an intensive amphibious assault on five beaches in Northern France — the largest invasion by sea in history — which, ultimately, led to the liberation of Paris two months later and marked a turning point in the fight against Nazi Germany.
Most of the photographs of D-Day — the pictures showing the courage of the troops landing amid relentless enemy fire — are black and white. These grainy images are, of course, dramatic, but they remain vaguely unrelatable for viewers raised in a color — not to mention filterable — world. Which is just one reason why this rare handful of restored color pictures, taken during the extraordinary landings as well as in the exhilarating days before and after, matters more than ever.
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397-Year-Old Pioneer of Street Photography Captures New York Since the 1940’s

After a knee injury slowed down her burgeoning dance career, Manhattanite Vivian Cherry turned to photography. It was an exciting time in New York City, as World War II caused a shift that moved the cultural heart of the world from Europe to New York. And Cherry, now 97 years old, was there to capture it all.
Cherry honed her photography skills as an assistant in a darkroom. “I was walking by a printers called Underwood and Underwood and I saw a sign saying, ‘Darkroom Help Wanted!–No Experience Necessary!’” she shared. “I remember it was the ‘no experience’ bit that caught my attention—I didn’t know what the job would entail. At that time they were short on people to print photographs because so many men had been drafted, so I applied and got the job.”
Even after she returned to dance, photography remained a passion and she dove into documentary photography for its ability to paint a picture of reality. From the subway to the streets of Spanish Harlem, Cherry immortalized life in New York City and the everyday people who called the city their home. Many of her stunning black and white images from the 1940’s and 1950’s show children at play or spending time with friends.

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4World Environment Day 2018: ‘Beat Plastic Pollution’

June 5 is marked by the United Nations as World Environment Day, a day set aside since 1974 to promote “worldwide awareness and action for the protection of our environment.” This year’s theme is “beat plastic pollution.” In a message, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres urged all people to reject single-use plastic items, and warned that growing levels of plastic waste were becoming unmanageable, saying “every year, more than eight million tons end up in the oceans.” Gathered here, a look at some of this plastic waste from the past year, accumulating in waterways, forests, and beaches across the globe, and some of the efforts to clean and recycle the mountains of material.

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5What Resulted When a Photographer Gave Rural Children Cameras

Every photographer has a give-and-take relationship with her subjects. Wendy Ewald has more give than most. Since 1975, the American artist has been entwining photography, activism, and education in a series of collaborations that upend our prevailing ideas of authorship and authority. For months, even years, at a time, she has moved into rural communities around the world—from Mexico and Morocco to India and the Netherlands—to teach local children how to use cameras. The resulting black-and-white photographs are credited to both Ewald and her students, who are quoted and named in the titles. (This started twenty years before the term “socially engaged art” entered the lexicon.)

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6Portraits From an Endless Summer

Most of us cherish a dream of an ideal getaway. Sailboats anchored off of a white-sand beach; a road trip down the Oregon coast; warm days and cool nights beside a rippling northern lake. Whatever the landscape, the feel of the dream is the same: a sense of abiding calm. During the middle part of the 20th-century, in pictures taken around the globe, photographer George “Slim” Aarons crafted pictures steeped in that timeless sensibility. Aarons himself said that his pictures chronicled “attractive people doing attractive things in attractive places,” a winning formula if ever there was one. Here, FOTO presents newly discovered, previously unseen Slim Aarons pictures taken between 1957 and 1980. Released by the Getty Images Gallery [Getty Images is the parent company of FOTO], these photos show us, as if for the first time, the endless summer of our dreams.

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7D-Day: Infrared photos reveal WW2 bunkers in new light

On 6 June 1944, World War Two allied forces launched one of the most ambitious amphibious attacks in history, landing along 50 miles of the heavily fortified Normandy coast in France and creating a significant dent in Hitler’s Atlantic Wall.
More than 70 years later, Lynda Laird photographed the remnants of Normandy’s bunkers using infrared film, a medium used by the military in WW2 to detect camouflage by exposing a visual spectrum that’s invisible to the naked eye.
The images were taken along the Normandy coast, from Utah beach to Deauville.
Accompanying Laird’s photographs is Odette Brefort’s diary entry from 6 June 1944. A member of the French Resistance, Brefort lived in Deauville throughout WW2, providing military intelligence on the German defences by drawing intricate maps to send to her comrades in Paris.

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Street Photography