You are currently browsing petebrook’s articles.
Frida (forsythia), 35″x35″, c-print
As much as I respect the portraiture genre within photography, it just isn’t my thing. Perhaps I am not confident enough sifting the very good from the good? Nevertheless, I was really taken by Meera Margaret Singh‘s work – there is something very gripping about her series Harbinger. One of the subjects is her mother, others are strangers.
“Previously when I had worked with strangers, the awkwardness sometimes fueled the work. Now I’m being a bit more discriminate about whom I photograph and at what stage in our encounter.” (Source: Nymphoto interview, 04/02/09)
“The surveillance system, dubbed Sigard, has been installed in Dutch city centers, government offices and prisons, and a recent test-run of the technology in Coventry, England, has British civil rights experts worried that the right to privacy will disappear in efforts to fight street crime. The system’s manufacturer, Sound Intelligence, says it works by detecting aggression in speech patterns.” – Story
via Boogie
Image: Privacy And Control, by Michael Pickard, Creative Commons: Attribution 2.0.
Happy Birthday America.
Precisely because “The Land of the Free” is a term now inseparable from rhetoric and politicking from any and all quarters, I’ll keep this brief.
America, like every nation on this earth, is and continues to be a work in progress. “Freedom” is a relative term, and if photographers in America do some things well, one of them is to remind us that by law (until very recently) some were freer than others.
I am always happy to promote socially-conscious photography that deals with racial injustices of the past and our need to address those injustices still. Furthermore, there are many good photographers who are working on inequalities today, based not in law, but in attitudes. Again, we are all works in progress, right?
WENDEL WHITE
Wendel White‘s Schools For The Colored depicts the landscape and architecture of historically segregated schools in northern states.
Texas Prison Rodeo, Huntsville, 1964. © Garry Winogrand
In 1964, with the support of a Guggenheim fellowship, Garry Winogrand traveled over four months to fourteen states and recorded an America in transition.
The result was WINOGRAND 1964. Here’s a review by Ned Higgins.
– – – – – –
AmericanSuburbX has republished Carl Chiarenza‘s “Standing on the Corner – Reflections Upon Garry Winogrand’s Photographic Gaze – Mirror of Self or World? Pt. I” (1991) originally in IMAGE Magazine: Journal of Photography and Motion Pictures of the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Volume 34, Number 3–4, Fall–Winter, 1991.
Including this statement: “The 1964 Guggenheim Fellowship was awarded to Winogrand to provide him with time to make “photographic studies of American life.” This fact inevitably recalls Robert Frank’s Guggenheim odyssey of a decade earlier. Something to think about—one wants to make comparisons. One wishes there were a Winogrand book comparable to Frank’s The Americans. But there is no such book.”
Think on.
Fonografia: “Money and press coverage started to arrive. Women organizers in Port-au-Prince camps spoke openly about the rapes and began raising money to move the victims into a new home, but as Bell says, “the visibility and funding have come with a price. Seeing all the ‘blan’ (human rights workers, gender advocates, journalists, delegations) troop to the women’s tents in Port-au-Prince, and knowing that ‘blan’ equals money, last week a man came to the KOFAVIV headquarters (a tarp in the middle of a camp) with a gun to kidnap one of the coordinators and to extract ransom from the coordinator. Fortunately, the plot failed. But (it) highlighted the utter danger that women and children face in the camps each day.”
Without apportioning blame, let’s all admit that we barely consider Haiti today. We all poured over the story, the ruin, the coverage – myself included. We took the opportunity to express our politics but we are too distant and too engaged elsewhere to sustain an informed, daily consciousness.
News media can be an empowering tool but it is also distorts our true commitment to its subjects. A flood soon becomes a trickle.
Last week, as part of that trickle, Deborah Sontag reported for the New York Times on the sexual violence threatening Haitian women.
Follow Beverly Bell’s writings on the issue of rape in Port-au-Prince since the earthquake, and consider supporting KOFAVIV’s efforts by making a donation and spreading the word.
Note: The Fonografia Collective have, as an exception to my point, been consistently committed to reporting on developments in Haiti.
Richard Renaldi has translated Freddy Langer’s review of Allison Davies’ Outerland which ran in The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, July 1, 2010. Richard and his partner Seth Boyd founded Charles Lane Press which published Outerland.
Renaldi: “The story Allison Davies tells us in Outerland is derived from those end-time allegories that have supplied modern American art with dramatic material for novels, movies, and ballads sad and cruel. It may well be a story fueled by fear of weapons of mass destruction after the terrorist attacks of September 11. Or a meditation on an impending climate catastrophe. But Outerland goes deeper. It asks the question: On the first day after the end of mankind, what will remain?”
This isn’t the first time Outerland has gotten some love. Joerg Colberg, theHulin, WIPNYC and James Danziger have all reviewed it. It’s fair to presume the book is a stonking good, memorable object.
A woman voices her opinion while a Police man looks on as hundreds of demonstrators gather outside a Toronto Police Station to protest against tactics used by the Police against anti G20 protesters over the weekend. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young
Just have to say, I enjoyed reading Chris Young‘s NPAC blog this week. He’s good with words:
A colleague of mine had advised me that kayaking helmets are the way forward for this kind of thing as they are built to come into contact with rocks. I went to a camping store and asked the guy behind the counter where they kept their rock proof helmets and was sent into the basement. There, I was met by Colin, a thin man with darting eyes. […] He looked me up and down, beckoned me towards him and asked in a hushed, conspiratorial tone “Is it for this weekend ?” I confessed it was. He quickly produced two helmets and began to give me the low down on what helmet could withstand what impact from what size rock and from what distance. I got the impression that Colin had been selling a lot of helmets recently.
The weapons cache found in the roof rack resembling a grade 2 project comprised of a crossbow, a chain saw, and a swiss army knife as well as an assortment of handyman tools. Unless this was an A-team inspired assassination kit it began to look like a hillbilly had stopped in town on the wrong day.
I’m the first to admit that I have a cynical streak […] maybe it’s from attending too many carefully choreographed PR stunts. But watching police cars haphazardly left at major intersections with easily flammable front seats whilst an unchecked mob of pimpled anarchists career towards them tugs at my senses. Was this a justification for the $1billion tab that the taxes payers have been left with for the summits?
The look on the cop’s face pretty much said it all. As he climbed onto his bike to trail a group of several hundred demonstrators as they set off march through the streets of Toronto to voice their anger at the detentions, harassment and beatings they’d experienced over the previous 48 hours. He looked like a five year old being dragged around a mall by his mum to find a new pair of gloves after he’d lost the last pair. Slightly guilty, though not completely sure why, and totally over it.
I enjoy reading interviews, but I enjoy more listening to a photographer speak while their photographs scroll.
I also love being able to mount a knowledge of British photography of the second half of the 20th century; an activity that is not quite the fabrication of nostalgia, but I’ll admit it is close (I was born in the eighties … just).
Prison Photography 