Everyone by now has heard the story of
Oscar Schindler, but he wasn't the only one
saving Jews in the dark era of WW II. This story was kept secret for many years, until the last member of the
Leitz family died.
posted by pjern
on Nov 10, 2006 -
21 comments
What Was True. From the mid 1950s through the early 1980s,
William Gedney (1932-1989) photographed throughout the
United States, in
India, and in
Europe, and filling
notebook after notebook with his observations. From the commerce of the street outside his Brooklyn apartment to the
daily chores of unemployed
coal miners, from the lifestyle of hippies in
Haight-Ashbury to the sacred rituals of Hindu worshippers, Gedney
was able to record the lives of others with clarity and poignancy.
Gedney's America is a nation of averted eyes, and broken automobiles, and restlessness, a place Edward Hopper would recognize, but so, also, Walt Whitman.
posted by matteo
on Apr 27, 2005 -
11 comments
A Tale of Two Chinas, by photographer
James Whitlow Delano.
Whole
swaths of cities have vanished, to be transformed with developments that have quickly made them look more like Houston, Qatar, or Singapore than
the ancient China of our mind's eye. The old hutong, or alleyways, of Beijing that once formed a mosaic of passageways and the siheyuan, or walled courtyard houses,
have been largely razed. The old brick rowhouses of Shanghai, are now being leveled and replaced by modern high-rises.
Traditional marketplaces, residential neighborhoods, streets where medicine shops or bookstores bunched together,
are now either gone or have been rouged up as tourist destinations, part of a new synthetic, virtual version of China's incredible past.
The energy fueling this transformation bespeaks a powerful but often
blind, unquestioning faith in an inchoate idea of progress that
takes one's breath away, often literally. (Unrestrained growth has left China with the dubious honor of having 9 of the 10 most polluted cities in the world).
Delano's new book
is "
Empire: Impressions from China". More inside.
posted by matteo
on Feb 17, 2005 -
23 comments
In search of lost time It was
Jack Kerouac who first defined
Robert Frank's
genius, who found in it some echo of
his own vision of a vast,
broken-down, but
still epic,
America,
peopled with
restless and lonely dreamers. 'Robert Frank, Swiss,
unobtrusive, nice,' wrote Kerouac in his now famous introduction to Frank's collection
The Americans , 'with that
little camera that
he raises and snaps
with one hand he sucked
a sad poem right
out of America on to
film, taking rank among the
tragic poets of the
world'.
Frank's exhibition,
Storylines, opens this week at the
Tate Modern in London.
posted by matteo
on Oct 27, 2004 -
6 comments
Family of Man Part 2 Many will remember
Edward Steichen's (the first photo curator of the New York Museum of Modern Art besides being one of photography's greats) epic 1955
Family of Man exhibition for the MOMA and the ubiquitous
book memorializing it. This is a worthy attempt at keeping that 50's spirit alive. PS all photos taken with Leica cameras, and for any Leica fanatics, take a peek at the just unveiled
Leica M7 while you are at it.
posted by Voyageman
on Mar 8, 2002 -
11 comments
