Cross-posted from BBC Reels. Editor’s Note: Robert Capa was an ASMP Life Member. Robert Capa and Gerda Taro, the most iconic couple in the history of war photography, were not actually who they claimed to be. The Jewish immigrants, who met in Paris after fleeing persecution, created fake identities to break into the competitive French press. The couple went on to lead long and influential careers that changed war photography forever.
Cross-posted from The New York Times. [By Guy Trebay] Gordon Parks was “the first Black member of the Farm Security Administration’s storied photo corps; the first Black photographer for the United States Office of War Information; the first Black photographer for Vogue; the first Black staff photographer at the weekly magazine Life; and, years later, the first Black filmmaker to direct a motion picture for a major Hollywood studio. By the standards of a Jim…
Cross-posted from The New York Times and Twitter thread. [By Siddhartha Mitter and John Edwin Mason] “Born in 1960s Harlem, the Kamoinge collective was influential in Black photography but ignored by the mainstream until recently. This exhibition should change that.” “Influential in Black photography circles, Kamoinge is little-known beyond. “Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop,” now at the Whitney Museum after originating at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, is the first museum…
Cross-posted from blind. [By Sophie Bernard] “If we were to keep only one of Marc Riboud’s images, it would have to be this stand-off between soldiers pointing their bayonet rifles and a young woman handing them a flower. The year was 1967 in Washington, D.C., the country was bogged down by the Vietnam War, and American youth were calling for an end to the fighting. A kind of visual counterpart to their slogan “Make love,…
Cross-posted from Vanity Fair. [By Philip Gefter] Editor’s Note: World famous portrait and fashion photographer Richard Avedon was an ASMP Member. “Making his name in the fashion world, the legendary portraitist and his creative contemporaries were forecasting the future of the culture—and the modern American woman.” “‘Avedon’s greatest creation has been a kind of woman,” photographer Irving Penn once said. ‘I know her. I’d recognize her if she walked in this room. She’s sisterly, laughs…
Cross-posted from Magnum. [By Rosalind Jana] Editor’s Note: Featured in this article is current ASMP Life Member Elliot Erwitt and former ASMP Member, the legendary Robert Capa. “A trench coat is a garment best worn on a gloomy day. Ideally with the collar turned up, or a gust of wind lifting the hem. If it’s raining, all the better. In Robert Capa’s photo of Lauren Bacall, at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II the actress,…
Cross-posted from The Eye Of Photography. “Before becoming a world-famous director of films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick started his career as a photographer. Between the age of 17 and 22, through still photography, Kubrick learnt the art of framing, composition and lighting, his main subject being his hometown, New York. His first photograph was published in 1945 by the famous illustrated magazine Look, of which he had…
Cross-posted from the Santa Barbara Independent [by Jean Yamamura] Ernie Brooks II, the famed under-ocean photographer, died today at the age of 85. Photography was in his blood as the son of the man who created the Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara and the grandson of a Portuguese woman who was a professional portrait photographer. Brooks not only graduated from his father’s institute and studied with Hans Haas, a pioneer of underwater documentaries,…
Cross-posted from Pro Photo Daily [by David Schonauer] Can Ansel Adams save the world in 2020? “In a world where the president of the United States has been actively working to undermine established environmental regulations, and in a world where each passing year can be marked with ice caps gushing more water into the oceans,” Adams’s meticulous documentation of American landscapes and passionate stance for environmental conservation may be just what we need, noted the…
Cross-posted from Magnum. “Cynthia Young, former head of the Robert Capa Archive at the International Center of Photography and curator of numerous exhibitions on photojournalism in the 1930-50s (including Capa in Color; We Went Back: Photographs from Europe 1933-1956 by Chim, and The Mexican Suitcase: The Rediscovered Negatives of Robert Capa, Chim and Gerda Taro) is the editor and author of the new edition of Capa’s Death in the Making. Here, Young and Magnum’s Cultural…