There’s a lot of writing about Jonathan Bachman’s photo of Ieshia Evans (below).  The first article linked here is a broader discussion of photography (including Bachman’s photo).  After that links to more specific discussions of the photo.

“The death of the photograph has been announced more than once. For at least a century, prophets have assured us that moving images, first on large screens and, now, on very small ones, would inevitably replace the photograph as the media that people look to first for news about their world. It has not happened yet. In fact, audiences continue to hunger for photographs precisely because they do not move. They are still, and because they are still we can linger over them, teasing out the information they carry. We read them as carefully as we would a poem. And, like a poem, photographs can pack an emotional wallop.”

Police, Protest, and the Matter of Black Lives: A Conversation on the Power of Photographs. by John Edwin Mason, Caille Millner, and Seph Rodney on July 15, 2016.

Read the article here.

• Other coverage of the photo…
  • Vice: “The Story Behind the Black Lives Matter Photo Seen Around the World”
  • Salon: “Anatomy of An Iconic Image: How this photograph of a protester in Baton Rouge could come to symbolize a movement”
  • Hyperallergic: “An Art Historical Perspective on the Baton Rouge Protest Photo that Went Viral”

Museum/Gallery Show…

Amplifying the Voices of Women Photographers in the Middle East

Rania Matar, “Stephanie, Beirut, Lebanon” from the series ‘A Girl and Her Room’ (2010), pigment print, 36 x 50 in (image courtesy the artist and Carroll and Sons, Boston; © Rania Matar)

Once I understood it was the editing, long after the photographing was completed, that became the important thing, it was less frustrating when I failed.

It was the sheer quantity of people on the street that made the spectacle unique. There were so many opportunities; you had to be perpetually alert and believe something was going to happen. You were not looking for photographs, but for the raw material that would make you want to photograph; the gesture or expression that demanded to be recorded. You were in the moment and you didn’t judge or qualify. For example, in the 1973 photograph taken at a parade, two business men are perched like statues on standpipes, trying to see over the heads of the crowd that had momentarily parted. They were serious; they had a sense of purpose. About what, the photograph doesn’t give a clue. That information is outside the frame’s viewpoint and beyond the camera’s scope.

Paul McDonough

If you’re not familiar with the work of Graciela Iturbide, have a look at this…

BBC has just posted a little profile: “Graciela Iturbide is one of the most influential Latin American photographers of her generation. While she is known for her stunning photographs of residents and festival goers of rural Mexico, Iturbide’s latest work is a collection photographing the natural world.”

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-36767755

You can also see an earlier profile by art21 on youtube:

• University of California Press
• Slought Foundation (includes audio interviews)
• Video on vimeo:
  • For over a decade, medical anthropologist Philippe Bourgois and his UC grad student Jeff Schonberg studied the lives of homeless heroin addicts as they scrambled to survive on the streets of San Francisco. Bourgois, the Richard Perry University Professor, has written extensively about drugs, violence, labor migration, ethnic conflict and urban poverty. To compile the research for their book, Righteous Dopefiend, Bourgois and Schonberg hung out with heroin injectors and crack smokers—listening and talking to them, observing how they live, photographing them and sometimes sleeping in their encampments. “In doing the fieldwork,” Bourgois says, “it was almost too hard to believe what we were seeing—a community of homeless drug users exists just yards away from major thoroughfares, but it remains invisible to people who pass by everyday. You only have to step down an alley, go behind a bush and—boom!—a universe of poverty and addiction opens up right in front of you.”
  • In this audio slide show of photos taken by Schonberg, Bourgois talks about this invisible world just next door.

Consider this quote from Anthropologist Daniel Miller:

“objects only come into being through prior acts of construction, and in the process of their manufacture they manifest a particular system of categorization.  Likewise, persons only come into being, with the particular cultural identities that they have, through a process of socialization involving these same material taxonomies. The process does not stop with socialization, however, for material forms remain as one of the key media through which people conduct their constant struggles over identity and confront the contradictions and ambiguities that face them in their daily lives. To go beyond a dualistic approach means recognizing that the continual process by which meaning is given to things is the same process by which meaning is given to lives” (Miller 2002: 417).

“Artefacts and the meaning of things” in Ingold, Tim, ed. Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology: Humanity, Culture and Social Life. 2nd edition. London; New York: Routledge, 2002.

Tuesday, October 7 at 7:00pm to 8:00pm
Harry Ransom Center (HRC) 300 21ST ST W, Austin, Texas 78705
*FREE EVENT*

The Harry Ransom Center and the Blanton Museum of Art present a lecture by Mexican photographer Alejandro Cartagena.

For nearly ten years, Cartagena has explored the relationship between Mexico’s urban centers and the suburbs built around them, examining the ways in which explosive growth has altered the landscape and affected the lives of residents. In this artist’s talk, Cartagena discusses the development of projects including Suburbia Méxicana, Carpoolers, and his latest work, Systematic Landscapes. Through these projects, Cartagena has found a way to shed light on issues surrounding the recent homeownership boom in Mexico by presenting many of the actors involved, from the buyers to the public bureaucrats promoting government loans. Cartagena explains how Mexico’s social and political context has proven to be both a benefit and a threat to many of these new buyers, opening up opportunities and challenges.

Cartagena lives and works in Monterrey, Mexico. His work has been exhibited internationally and is in the collections of several museums including the Harry Ransom Center, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Portland Museum of Art, the Museo de Arte Moderno in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and the Fototeca Nacional in Pachuca, Mexico.
The program is free and open to the public, but donations are welcome. Seating is first-come, first-served, and doors open at 6:30 p.m.

Attendees may enter to win a copy of Alejandro Cartagena’s Suburia Mexicana and a set of Ransom Center postcards.

The famous photojournalist and documentarian, James Nachtwey is featured in this Time Magazine profile: James Nachtewy: 30 years.

Re-photography is a fascinating process (to undertake) and engrossing to look at.  Following the recent Urban Outfitters debacle an article at Salon.com featured this unattributed composite photograph:

Martin Parr is an English photographer.  One of the series he’s famous for is studio portraits (Autoportraits) of himself as he travels around the world. Recently a journalist named Esther Honig has undertaken a similar kind of project, though it was one trained on international beauty standards.  In her work she’s chosen to send a photograph of herself to studios in different countries that specialize in photoshopping and altering images for formal portraits.  Read more about it here:

• SLR Lounge
  
• Petapixel