Grit and toughness.
Mary Ellen Mark’s uncompromising style made a huge impact on photojournalism. Cartier-Bresson with acid added, if you like. She passed away the other day and clicking the image below will tell you more.
American photographer.
It’s easy to think of Berenice Abbott (1898 – 1991) as the woman who ‘discovered’ all those great Atget images, making the photographer posthumously famous, but she was also a fine photographer in her own right, and the New York Times article linked above goves a great introduction to the woman and her work. Her portrait image, above, was made by Walker Evans.
Iranian woman photographers.
Ordinarily gender is irrelevant when it comes to good photography. All that matters is the image. But when the photographer is a member of one of the most ill treated subsets of humanity then gender becomes supremely relevant.
Iranian Shadi Gadirian’s work is a slap in the face, illustrated with gorgeously lit and composed still lives each with an instrument of death incongruously placed in the image, that same violent death which is an ever present factor in much of Middle Eastern and Northern African life.
I came across Gadirian’s work in what at first seemed a pretty unprepossessingly titled show at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University: “She Who Tells a Story: Women Photographers from Iran and the Arab World”. The exhibition – not large but mostly comprised of very large prints – turned out to be absolutely gripping.
Another rivetting image is one by Yemeni female photographer Boushra Almutawakel which shows women with their faces progressively more covered by the veils they are forced to wear in what is an ultimate statement of cruelty – denying beauty its rightful exposure to sunlight:
Here’s another stunner from Almutawakel, titled “What If…?”:
If ever a picture were worth a thousand (angry) words, this is it.
There’s lots more to enjoy and wonder at in this fine show, which runs thorugh May 4, 2015; Stanford U and the Cantor Arts Center are in Palo Alto, CA. Encomiums to Stanford for putting on this fearless exhibition.
Book review.
Nearly a decade ago I made mention of Gambee’s other Wall Street book, Wall Street Christmas.
The book in this review is every bit as good, replete with magnificent photographs of the grand facades of Wall Street buildings and many of their interiors. The finance industry has long known that if you are to accrue great wealth at the expense of your customer base, you have to present an image of carefully crafted respectability, meaning marble and mahogany. The execution of this belief is abundantly on display in Gambee’s work.
Even if you are no great fan of the banksters who every so often bring the global financial system to its knees, you will enjoy the photography in this splendid book. Mine came from Amazon but took some three months between order and arrival, so be prepared to wait. It’s worth it.
Outstanding vision.
After the Germans had gassed you in one of their ‘shower rooms’ in Auschwitz, your gold filled teeth were extracted and the metal removed and deposited in a Swiss bank vault. It remains there, unclaimed, to this day and aggregates, by some estimates, $1 trillion in free capital which is the underpinning of the Swiss banking industry.
British photographer Mark Henley, who calls Switzerland home, has done a masterful job of portraying the amoral institution which is Swiss private banking, in a (shockingly poorly attributed – see if you can find his name) tremendous documentary piece published in Bloomberg News.
You can see more of Henley’s work by clicking the image below – beware that some of his images are very reluctant to appear on the poorly engineered Panos website. Try dialing up his bio as an example.
