kottke.org posts about photography
While working for the FDR administration in 1936, photographer Dorothea Lange took the following photograph:
You’ve likely seen it before…it’s called Migrant Mother and it’s one of the more famous American photos. When she took the photo, Lange neglected to note the woman’s name (or other details) so her identity remained anonymous while the photo went on to become a symbol of the Great Depression. In the late 1970s, Florence Owens Thompson revealed herself to be the woman in the photo after she wrote a letter to her local paper saying that she didn’t like the image. In an AP story about the ensuing flap, Thompson stated:
I wish she hadn’t taken my picture. I can’t get a penny out of it. [Lange] didn’t ask my name. She said she wouldn’t sell the pictures. She said she’d send me a copy. She never did.”
In addition to not taking her subject’s name, Lange got something else wrong. Thompson and her family weren’t typical Depression migrants at all; they’d been living in California for almost 10 years. Like all photographs, Migrant Mother is neither truth nor fiction but somewhere in-between.
If you’re at a loss for something to wear tomorrow, check out the Wardrobe Remix photo pool on Flickr…12,000+ photos of normal people showing off what they’re wearing. “i believe the best stylists walk the streets, not the photo sets, nor the backstage of the runways. the real innovators are you and me: real, fashionable people, men and women alike.”
Finalists in Smithsonian magazine’s 2007 photo contest. Some good stuff in here, but some of it is a little cheesy.
Photos of the offices of prominent New Yorkers. You can tell which of these people actually use their offices to get work done…Martha Stewart’s computer monitor is stashed neatly away in a drawer. For a less rarefied look at people’s workspaces, try the Desk Space, My Desk, and My Cluttered Desk photo pools on Flickr.
Update: I read Martha’s item incorrectly…her keyboard is in a drawer, not her monitor. Still, I contend that she doesn’t do any real work in that office. (thx, haran and eric)
A man named Dusan Stulik is working to document and preserve all the different ways in which photographs have been made. “Surprisingly, the large photography companies — Kodak, Ilford, Fuji, Polaroid and Agfa — did not save samples of the hundreds of different films and papers they developed over the last century. We’re hoping that you did.”
A photo of a Jewish settler seemingly fighting about 50 soldiers by herself won a prize in the 2007 World Press Photo contest.
Update: In an earlier iteration of this post, I incorrectly identified the woman in the photo as a Palestinian…she is a Jewish settler. (thx to everyone who wrote in)
Interview with Gretchen Ludwig about her dressing room photography. She started the project after she noticed her anti-advertising, anti-corporation self buying a lot of clothes from big corporations that advertise a lot. “The dressing room is not only a very private space, but it is also a space where consumers make most of their decisions. And it’s also mostly void of extraneous marketing ‘noise.’ You don’t have the trendy atmosphere, you don’t have the pressure of others watching and judging you.”
Joerg Colberg asked a bunch of photographers and photography bloggers: what makes a great photo? The answers, with examples, form a great informal discussion about art, photography, and curating. “It’s hard for me to describe what makes a great photo mostly because it’s hard to predict what you might like before you see it. I’m often surprised by things that I’ve never thought I would enjoy or seek out in the world.”
Museumr lets you insert one of your Flickr photos into a museum (sort of). I gave my beer bottle-shaped sausage photo the Museumr treatment. (thx, chuck)
Shorpy, the 100-year-old photoblog, is pulling photos from just after the turn of the century and posting them. This one’s going right in the daily reads pile.
Expectations of Adolescence is a series of photographs of two cousins as they grow up, seen periodically only at large family gatherings. “We see them as they grow up, become more and more themselves, chafing perhaps at the obligations implied by required attendance in surroundings of upper-crust comfort that remain unchanged and constant.”
The Face2Face Project takes similar photographs of Palestinians and Israelis and displays them together in pairs. “After a week [in Israel and Palestine], we had a conclusion with the same words: these people look the same; they speak almost the same language, like twin brothers raised in different families. It’s obvious, but they don’t see that. We must put them face to face. They will realize.” (via 3qd)
Photos of people sleeping. Each series of photos depcits a full night’s sleep. (via cyn-c)
Photographer Alec Soth has a response to the Richard Avedon essay regarding his portrait of Henry Kissinger. “While Avedon is correct that the subject is sometimes ‘implicated in what’s happening,’ more often than not the photographer holds all of the cards.” (thx, jen)
In 1940, an ultra orthodox Jewish group known as the Lubavitchers bought a building at 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn. The building became so well-known and revered within the community that other “770s” have been built around the world and subsequently captured by photographers Andrea Robbins and Max Becher. (via paks)
Richard Avedon on photographing Henry Kissinger: “A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he’s being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he’s wearing or how he looks. He’s implicated in what’s happening, and he has a certain real power over the result.” Here’s the photo that Avedon is referring to. (via personism)
Nice composite photo of the lunar eclipse last night. We missed it because it was a bit cloudy and tall buildingy in NYC last night. (thx, ajit)
Update: Here’s another, another, and one more.
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