Click Above to See James Nachtwey’s TED Prize presentation.
Photographers Showcase: "Freedom's Cause"
Today we welcome MIchael David Murphy to NCN. Michael is a writer and photographer based in Atlanta, GA. We featured one of his photographs earlier in the year under our “Sight Gag” category, but here we ask you to consider one of his photo-textual studies called “Freedom’s Cause” inspired by Barack Obama’s stump speech. The photographs below are a side project of Michael’s presidential campaign project “So Help Me …”
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Barack Obama’s candidacy for President contains a direct link to the successes of the Civil Rights movement. While campaigning, Obama often referred to the movement’s successes and struggles:
“That’s how women won the right to vote, how workers won the right to organize, how young people like you traveled down South to march, and sit-in, and go to jail, and some were beaten, and some died for freedom’s cause. That’s what hope is.” (02/12/2008, Madison, WI)
While photographing the primaries across the Southern states, I visited locations where the echoes of the Civil Rights struggle can still be heared — places that have nearly gone quiet during the more than forty years in between. History doesn’t just happen, it goes down, and as a photographer, witnessing what our country chooses to commemerate, and what we all collectively and selectively choose to forget, can be instructive. These three locations, each in Mississippi, may be views of America’s troubled past, but when seen through the lens of Obama’s candidacy, they telescope forward toward an optimistic future.
On August 27th, 1955, a few months after the murder of Rev. George Lee, fourteen year old Emmitt Till walked into Bryant’s Store in Money, Mississippi.
There are conflicting stories about what happened when Till left the store, but he apparently said something (or whistled) at the store owner’s wife, Carolyn Bryant. Later that night, Till was kidnapped from his great uncle’s house, and taken to a shed where he was beaten, then shot, then dropped into the Tallahatchie River with a fan tied to his neck.
When Till’s body was recovered, Till’s mother insisted on having an open casket funeral in Chicago, and encouraged photographs of Till’s disfigured body, which were published in Jet. Nearly 100,000 people saw Till’s body during a four-day public viewing.
in 1957, Bryant’s Store closed due to lack of business. In August, 2007, a Mississippi historical marker showing the location of the killing was stolen.
On May 7th, 1955, Rev. George Washington Lee, the first black person to register to vote since reconstruction in Humphreys County, Mississippi, was driving down Church St. in Belzoni, a small town in the Delta. Rev. Lee was well-known in the area for his voter initiatives, successfully registering blacks to vote.
As he drove down Church St., Rev. Lee was tailed by men in a convertible. Someone shot out his right rear tire, at which point another car pulled alongside, and Rev. Lee was fatally shot, point-blank in the face. Rev. Lee’s Buick hopped a curb and slammed into a house, and the Reverend died on the way to Humphreys County Memorial Hospital.
There were witnesses who saw the fatal shot, but couldn’t identify the killers. The FBI investigated, discovered enough evidence to take the case to trial, but the local prosecutor declined, saying a Humphreys County grand jury “probably would not bring an indictment.” There seemed to be consensus in Belzoni as to who the killers were, but they were never prosecuted. In death, Rev. Lee’s actions helped usher the passage of the Voting Rights Act ten years later, in 1965.
Belzoni is a quiet town in the Mississippi delta. It’s catfish country, and they even have their own Catfish Museum and Catfish Festival. It’s the kind of place where you can stand in the middle of the road under a darkcloth to make a photograph and no one will pay you any mind.
This is Country Road #515 in Mississippi. It was called “Rock Cut Road” back in 1964.
On June 21st, 1964, three civil rights workers were booked into the Neshoba County Jail after being arrested for speeding through Philadelphia, Mississippi. The three (James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman) had driven to Longdale earlier that day to see the remains of a church that had been firebombed by the KKK. The firebombing was apparently targeting Schwerner, who had plans to turn the church into a “Freedom School”. Freedom Schools where established during Freedom Summer in the South by a coalition of CORE, SNCC & the NAACP.
The three were released at 10:30 that night and told to leave the county. Just before reaching the county line, their car was overtaken by a group of men that included law enforcement. Their station wagon was forced over to the side of the road. The three were pulled from their vehicle and taken to “Rock Cut Road”, where they were beaten and shot.
The killings raised national attention to the Civil Rights struggle in the South. Robert Kennedy got the FBI involved (because Mississippi law enforcement was so slow to respond), and their remains were found a month later. No one has been convicted for their murder, but in 2005, Edgar Ray Killen was convicted for manslaughter for his role in recruiting the mob that was involved with the killings.
Through the efforts of volunteer workers (often from out of state, Schwerner and Goodman, who were both from New York), over 100,000 new black voters were registered in Mississippi in two years, and the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965.
Harlem, the Landscape
ArIc Mayer is an exceptionally thoughtful photographer whose work has been featured before at this blog. He has a new series of images that, like so much of his work, encourage contemplation of a subject that is otherwise trapped in stock images articulating a standard narrative. We know all about Katrina, right? Or the beauty of the American West. Or Harlem. We may have never been there, but we know the story. Aric never denies what is really there in the story, nor does he provoke the viewer to see things from some odd angle. Instead, he carefully works you into his line of vision until you start to think about what you are seeing. After that, you’re on your own, but that is enough.
The new set of photographs are from Harlem. You know, the streets teeming with bodies, sound, and signage. The once magnificent buildings now dilapidated, the streets lined with litter and grafitti, the iron grates on the storefronts and the lurid murals on the walls. Like this:
Oh, to be able to describe the beauty, the intelligence of trees. Beauty too rarely seen, for how often do we stop and simply look up? How often on a cloudy spring day, and in the city? What is more important, however, is not that he looked up, but that this is given to us without any sense of contrast. The message is not that a world of beauty and potential lies just above the concrete, nor the ugly insinuation that beauty is everywhere–i.e., even in Harlem. This is a photograph of nature, but not to denigrate urban life. There is no myth, no transcendence, no need to escape. Instead, a different resonance: wisdom, ancient ways, endurance, another dimension waiting to be heard.
Perhaps even serenity:
But “serenity” is too simple. As with the first image, there is something poignant, even haunting about this photograph. A drain can conjure up images of water and of floods, or of blood and of too much being drained away, or of waste and the ultimate return to the earth. And yet this spot is so clean, and so well worn, as if rubbed smooth by many generations of spring rains. The bird-like shape of the lighter patch could be a totemic animal, or the drain some kind of communication device. If the stones could speak, would we listen? Were we to see the city anew, like a spring landscape, what would we see?
You can see the full set of Aric Mayer’s Harlem photographs here.
Photographer's Showcase: AMERIKA
Last month we introduced Tom White to the readers of NCN. Today we are pleased to announce a show that he has curated (along with Nico Silberfaden and Deirdre School) titled “AMERIKA, A Group Exhibition” that opens at the Bushwick Open Studies in Brooklyn, NY on Friday, June 6th 2008. The show includes the work of twenty four different photographers and speaks to the vexing question of American identity animated by what Ralph Ellison described as “the pathology of American democracy” and the discrepancies between our democratic ideals and social realities.
According to the catalog, “The photographers in this collection exemplify the cross cultural nature of America. While living here – whether American born, foreign immigrants or just passing through-each one represents a facet of htis diverse society and has a unique take on its culture. There is more than just a geographical link; each photograph in some way addresses the nature of American life. These pictures are grounded in a particular American reality, a ‘New Americana’ if you like…. If ‘America’ is the ideal, then ‘Amerika’ is the social reality.”
Click here or on the photograph above to see a sample slide show of the work in the exhibit.
Photographer's Showcase: The Ways of Paint
This week our showcase takes us outside the ambit of photojournalism. David Sutton is a professional photographer who creates remarkable portraits of people and their animals. His distinctive black and white images have appeared in numerous media outlets and brought him the unique honor of being named the best pet photographer in America by the magazine Forbes FYI. You can see some of David’s portraiture at his studio website. Today’s showcase provides a glimpse of some of David’s other work and of how he sees the world in color. The five photographs below are from a series entitled The Ways of Paint. David remarks that he is intrigued by how “paint reveals processes.” And so it does, while also becoming richly evocative.
Photographer's Showcase: The Reciprocity of People and Environment
This week we welcome Tom White to the NCN community. Tom is a freelance photographer who lives in New Jersey and hails from Bradford, West Yorkshire in the north of England. Tom has studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths College in London and and photojournalism and documentary photography at the International Center of Photography in New York. His travels have taken him throughout Europe, as well as the Far East, Brazil, and India, and his work has been published in the U.S. and U.K. and exhibited in both places as well as in Japan.
The photo-essay below is from a series on the reciprocal nature of people and their environment, focusing on the way people shape the landscape, which in turn shapes the people. We offer the images initially without commentary, but include White’s captions at the very end.
1. A coal fired power plant in NJ looms over an area which was once a small rural township.
2. A gas station forecourt on I-78 in PA stands empty amongst the vestiges of the surrounding countryscape.
3. Bobby and Richie relax on a step outside a bar just off the Tonelle Avenue 1&9 truck route in NJ.
4. Half Latino, half Chinese, “Chino Chan” stands at Whitlock Ave. Station in the South Bronx, a densely populated and heavily industrialized region.
5. A heavily trafficked area near the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel from NJ to NYC.
6. A boy plays basketball surrounded by derelict warehouses scheduled to become luxury condos in Jersey City.
7. Homeless man Randy Vargas sleeps in front of a church affiliated community center in Hoboken, NJ.
8. Members of the New Black Panther Party – a group unrelated to the original Black Panthers – stage a demonstration against street violence in Newark, NJ.
9. A knotted flag on the gatepost of an industrial estate in NJ.
Photographers Showcase: Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot
This week’s showcase photographer is Ashley Gilbertson. He will need no introduction for many NCN readers. Gilbertson is an internationally recognized photojournalist whose work has appeared in Time, Newsweek, and the NYT and many other national and international publication outlets as well. Deeply concerned with the problem of social conflict he has photographed everything from Kosovar refugees to heroin addicts in Melbourne to the gun trade in Papua to the accelerated disappearance and destruction of the Uyghur culture to Aids patients in China. In 2004 he won the prestigious Robert Capa Award for his work in Fallujah and was also named the National Photographer of the Year.
Gilbertson is perhaps best known for his recent work on the American experience in Iraq and his 2007 book of photographs and reflections titled Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer’s Chronicle of the Iraq War. We are very pleased to showcase a small bit of that work here at NCN.
Click on the photograph below for a brief Quicktime movie slide show of Ashley Gilberson’s work from Iraq.
Photographer's Showcase: The Other China
This week we welcome Aric Mayer to NCN. Aric’s work has been sponsored by both Hasselbad and Fuji, and has appeared prominently in places like the Wall Street Journal (on Hurricane Katrina). His work regularly shows up at prominent art galleries and he helped to found the Pratt Artists’ League, an artists collective that specializes in promoting new curatorial models for emerging artists. According to detritus, he is a “dowser. Like a man with a willow branch searching out sweetwater he finds and captures the shot at just the moment it runs clear and pure. Potable; pellucid; powerful.”
The work shown here is from far western China. You probably have seen photographs recently touting the dazzling new structures going up in preparation for the Olympics. Aric’s work reminds us that, away from the spectacle, ethnic repression is still a fact of life for some in China today.
An elderly man counts his money from the morning market in Kashgar. Kashgar is the largest trading town on the Silk Road in China. The Uygur have been doing business here for centuries.
A woman wears a traditional Uygur veil in the old section of Kashgar. The Uygur practise a unique brand of Islam, partly their own and partly under the control of the Chinese government.
A 59 feet tall statue of Chairman Mao dominates the square in the center of Kashgar. As throughout China, much of the town has been torn down to make way for broad boulevards and big squares. The poorest sections of town are left alone. What is left of the original culture is often turned into theme park like tourist attractions.
Light from a door illuminates text on a wall. The Uygur language is written in an Arabesque script. The Uygur guard their cultural heritage from assimilation into Chinese culture. Too often this forces them to chose between adopting the Chinese language and mannerisms for the economic opportunities that come with them, or staying with their Uygur heritage.
Uygur men at the livestock market in Kashgar. The Uygur are an ethnic minority in China. They trace their heritage back for 5,000 years in this part of the world. They speak an Arabic language, have their own Arabesque alphabet and have distinctly different features from the Chinese.
A Uygur boy helps to move the day’s goods to and from the market.
A Uygur girl heads to the market in a silk dress in Kashgar.
A Han businessman travels west by train from Beijing. He is heading to Urumqi in Xingiang, on the Northern side of the Taklamakan desert. With a population of 1.5 million, Urumqi is a fast growing business center for western China. Lucrative contracts are given to Han business owners, encouraging investment and immigration from the east. Many Uygur are left behind in this economic boom.
Photographer's Showcase: Campaign 2008 – On The Road
Today we are introducing a new feature that we call the “Photographer’s Showcase.” From time to time we will post the work of photographers whom we believe exemplify or extend photojournalism as it is an important public art. We will feature their work without commentary, although we do of course encourage you, our readers, to comment and link on behalf of our common interests.
There are many fine photographers and the authors of this blog know only a very few of them. We spend our days in the university, not the newsroom, and have little opportunity to meet with working photographers, attend exhibitions, or otherwise make connections that could lead to work being posted here. If you know of photographers whose work should be featured, please contact us. Self-nominations are welcome, as photographers today have enough problems without having to be modest as well.
We inaugurate the Photographer’s Showcase with the work of Patrick Andrade. Patrick is a freelance photographer affiliated with the Atlas Press. His work has appeared in the NYT, Newsweek, and Paris Match as well as many other places. He is currently following the campaign for the presidency. The work posted here is a series of black and white photographs that feature the people of Campaign 2008 – On The Road. Click on the photograph below to see the full slide show.
