2In Focus,a new series that explores what happens when creative professionals and ProCamera come together.
Visual artist Lance Hewison, who has guest blogged for us a few times already, has directed the first episode featuring Berlin-based street photographer Martin U Waltz. Check out the debut of our very first episode here:
In May 2017 8 students of the “Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie” supported by the “Klaus-Stemmler-Stiftung” had the opportunity to go to Manchester to photograph their view of Brexit. Following this trip, 8 series have been created that show the English everyday life.
4The First Candid Photograph of a Human, and the Interesting Facts Behind It
If you were asked to name the earliest known candid photograph of a person, I’m guessing that you wouldn’t come up with Boulevard du Temple, shown above.
Taken by Louis Daguerre in 1838, it’s not exactly a close up of the two men on the street, one of which is apparently shining the other’s shoes.
That’s because this image was never intended to be a portrait.
Instead, Daguerre was taking a photo of the Boulevard du Temple, a busy Paris street teeming with people on the sidewalks and carriages in the street.
5These vintage photos of New York show the heyday of the ‘Mean Streets’ look
Things tend to look grittier in hindsight. Maybe it’s the patina of age, or the strangeness of a distant era—or the black-and-white rendering—but a strange side effect of old photos is how they lend gravity to even the most innocuous subjects. Aging photographers know this best, often discovering much later that photos made in their formative years have accrued a depth that wasn’t there at inception. This mutability is part of what distinguishes photography, tethered as it is to our predilection for nostalgia. But pictures don’t actually change over time. It’s us, in our romanticizing of an opaque and intangible past, who compartmentalize time into orderly, discrete segments and call it history.
6The photographers who captured 10 of the year’s most powerful images tell the story behind the moment.
Through the noise and chaos of Syria’s civil war, it was this image of an elderly man enjoying a moment of peace amid the rubble that caught the world’s attention.
The man is Mohammed Anis, who made his fortune with a cosmetics factory and spent much of it collecting classic cars. Most of his 24 cars were destroyed during the war, despite his best efforts — including convincing rebel fighters not to mount an antiaircraft gun on his 1958 Chevrolet.
When AFP photographer Joseph Eid and a journalist colleague met Anis, the 70-year-old invited the two into the bomb-battered home he had refused to leave through the years of violence. As they wandered into this bedroom, Eid noticed the hand-cranked gramophone, a luxury unaffected by Aleppo’s electrical shortages, and asked Anis if it worked. “Of course!” the old man replied. “But first I have to light my pipe, because I never listen to music without it.”
Eid told RFE/RL by e-mail that he believes the power of the image is that “it summarizes the tragedies of the Syrian war without showing any graphic content…. It simply talks about the power of life.” The last the photographer heard, Ani had restarted his cosmetic business and was busy rebuilding his home.
