2Don’t Blink Robert Frank
If you didn’t had the chance to watch the documentary about Robert Frank’s past photography achievements here is an article that gives you a little more insight in this mastermind of Street Photography.
Frank, a Swiss-born US immigrant, is best known for his revolutionary collection of 83 photographs “The Americans” that was first published in France in 1958. For that project, Frank took to the road and traveled 10,000 miles for nine months, taking 27,000 pictures of America.
Frank says his interest lies in visually representing the nature of everyday people rather than the aesthetics of landscape.
Shot in an emotional, impulsive and subjective manner, “The Americans” was groundbreaking in a way that demolished the convention of a neat, perfectly composed style of photography.
3Soviet Era Memorials in Black and White
The Soviet Union wasn’t really known for modesty. Jan Kempenaers photographed a series about the long forgotten memorials that are still a symbol of this era.
Like the photographer’s Spomenik series, The Untitled photoset focuses on a series of ruined concrete monuments built in the 1960s and 70s across the former Yugoslavian territories.
This time, Kempenaers has also included structures in Germany and France, showing them in black and white.
410 Most Controversial Moments in the History of Photography
Do you remember the outrage when the story broke that McCurry photoshopped his images?
Here is an article featuring 10 more Moments that were highly controversial.
In 1862, at the height of the Civil War, photographer Mathew Brady—whose 1864 portrait of Abraham Lincoln is visible on the $5 bill—organized an exhibition in his New York studio called “The Dead of Antietam.” For the first time, Americans saw images, primarily taken by Brady staffer Alexander Gardner, of the soldiers killed and maimed on the battlefield; the results were shocking. “Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war,” wrote The New York Times in October 20, 1862. “If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it.”While Brady was not the first war photographer—Roger Fenton of Great Britain and Carol Szathmari of Austria-Hungary captured images of the Crimean War of the 1850s—he and his staff are largely recognized as the fathers of photojournalism.
5Michael McCoy, the Veteran Who Fights PTSD with Photography
Photography can be like a therapy for many. For Michael McCoy it is an outlet to cope with PTSD and it is a very beautiful way of dealing with his illness.
Michael McCoy, at age 34, has had two tours in Iraq over five years with the United States Army, and spent time at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, MD. He was medically discharged from the Army in 2008, and has been receiving treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
“During his hospitalization, he discovered documentary photography and from that moment on it has been instrumental in helping him deal with his struggle,” says artist Jamel Shabazz, one of 12 experts who was asked by Time’s LightBox to pick 12 African American Photographers You Should Follow Right Now for Black History Month. “Since picking up the camera he has amassed a compelling body of work, showcasing everything from portraits, families, fathers and daughters, church services, and political protest. In addition to working as a freelance photographer, Michael is dedicated to helping veterans like himself battle PTSD using photography as a platform for both creativity and inter-communication.”
6How Henryk Ross Risked His Life To Secretly Photograph Life In A Nazi Ghetto
“There was an order: ‘All the Jews to the ghetto!’ ” Henryk Ross would later recall. “The Jews in the town were robbed. They carried the remains of their possessions into the [Lodz] ghetto.”
Ross said this seated in a court witness stand in May 1961. He was dressed in a sport coat and button down shirt, open at the collar, testifying in his native Polish at the trial of the Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann, one of the hideous masterminds of the Holocaust. Ross was remembering back to the monstrous days at the beginning of 1940, recalling how he came, at age 30, to be imprisoned by the Nazis with hundreds of thousands of other Jews in the ghetto the Germans set up in the Polish city of Lodz. Prosecutors were using photos that Ross risked his life to secretly take there as part of the evidence that would help them convict Eichmann.
