Passings - Bunny Yeager (1929~2014)
Labels: Obituaries, Women in Photography
“What we need is a critique of visual culture that is alert to the power of images for good and evil and that is capable of discriminating the variety and historical specificity of their uses.” - W.J.T. Mitchell. Picture Theory (1994).
Labels: Obituaries, Women in Photography
"I was thinking what state the world is in, being an American - there is such a mix of positives and negatives ..." - Mary Halvorson
Labels: Music, patriotism
Labels: Critics, David Levi Strauss, New Books
Labels: camera, Leica, photojournalism
Labels: Art, political graphics, politics
Labels: digest, Nina Berman, Piketty & Saez, Rebecca Solnit, Vijay Iyer
"Friedlander’s most indelible images are his portraits of musicians. Friedlander arrived in New Orleans at a high point in the jazz revivalist movement, when fans of jazz as it was originally played in New Orleans in the first two decades of the twentieth century (before the perceived corruptions of swing and bebop) descended on the city with tape recorders and notepads and cameras, hoping to catch some of the old magic and document it for posterity. [. . .]
Friedlander’s portraits do not feel celebratory, however. He found authenticity all right, . . . in the toll taken on his subjects by decades of privation and indifference. In his portraits the musicians—most of whom didn’t have the chops to follow Joe Oliver and Louis Armstrong north to Chicago forty years earlier—stare wistfully into the distance, or at the wall, as if indulging in some bittersweet private nostalgia. Many sit beside old family photographs, including pictures of themselves as young men. Some are photographed with their instrument, which they hold impotently, or rest in their laps. Their apartments are spare and poorly lit. There is dignity in these portraits, to be certain, and pride, but there is also despair."
"This sense of melancholy also shadows Friedlander’s photographs of performances. When George Lewis’s band plays a Bourbon Street tourist trap called the Paddock Lounge, the ceiling is so low that he almost has to duck, and nobody else in the frame—a patron, two bartenders—seems aware that they are in the presence of jazz royalty, an impression that is amplified by the insulting presence of the lawn jockey posing directly in front of Lewis. There are no audience members, for that matter, visible in most of the performance pictures, giving the impression that the musicians are playing for themselves."
Labels: Friedlander, Hobsbawm, jazz, Music, New Orelans, race, RIJF
Labels: Obituaries, photojournalism, War, Women in Photography
Labels: Labor, May Day, political graphics, politics, Solidarity