Photography for the Blog of it

George H. Scurlock

2012-01-28T06:42:00.001-08:00

2012-01-27T05:56:00.000-08:00

Freddy Alborta

2012-01-26T06:21:00.000-08:00

Morris Engel

2012-01-20T08:01:00.001-08:00

Horst Tappe

2012-01-18T12:49:00.001-08:00

Dale Guldan

2012-01-17T06:58:00.001-08:00

Brian Lanker

2012-01-14T08:21:00.000-08:00

LeRoy Grannis

2012-01-14T08:09:00.000-08:00

Michael Abramson

2012-01-13T05:32:00.001-08:00

Richard Steinheimer

2012-01-11T05:14:00.000-08:00

T. Lux Feininger

2012-01-10T05:58:00.001-08:00

Charles Brittin dies at 82; photographer who chronicled movements of 1950s and '60s

2012-01-09T05:44:00.000-08:00

His unblinking yet compassionate photographs in the 1950s and '60s documented Los Angeles' beat culture and emerging art scene, the civil rights movement here and in the Deep South, the Black Panthers and antiwar protests.
Yet Charles Brittin was relatively unknown.
Sidelined by declining health beginning in the '70s, he faded from the scene as documentary photographers were first being recognized as artists, said Andrew Perchuk, deputy director of the Getty Research Institute, which holds Brittin's photographic archive.
"He was an absolutely critical figure in Los Angeles, because he was at the intersection of so many things that were happening," Perchuk said. "He also was one of the great civil and political photographers of the age."
Brittin, who had liver and kidney transplants in the 1990s, died Sunday of pneumonia at Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica, said his lawyer, Salomon Illouz. He was 82.
One of the first subjects to fascinate Brittin as a photographer was a sleepy Venice Beach, where he took pictures "freighted with a hushed beauty and forlorn sweetness," according to the book "Charles Brittin: West and South," scheduled to be published in April.
He preserved a pre-gentrified Venice that has all but vanished: Oil derricks jockey with houses and a waterway and decay creeps into the frame of a once-grand colonnade. In "Big Head, Ocean Park" (1957), a slightly disturbing and clownish ticket booth stands sentry at a funhouse.
A chance meeting in the 1950s with seminal beat-scene artist Wallace Berman pulled Brittin into a circle of avant-garde artists who hung out on La Cienega Boulevard at the Ferus Gallery, the influential contemporary art gallery.
Brittin's Venice Beach shack became the group's second home, and he turned into the unofficial house photographer of a crowd that included actors Dean Stockwell and Dennis Hopper, artist John Altoon, curator Walter Hopps and poet David Meltzer.
"He was probably the beat generation photographer," said Craig Krull, a Santa Monica gallery owner who exhibited Brittin's work in 1999.
"A lot of the people Charles took pictures of ended up becoming legendary figures," Krull said. "His photographs are more than just documents of artists and events. They are very incisive and powerful and poetic and tough."
They also have a "romantic resonance," because many of the elements in them are "gone forever," Brittin said in the catalog for the 1999 show.
As the beat movement gave way to civil unrest in the 1960s, Brittin took his camera to the front lines, and his often tightly focused images were filled with raw emotion. One from a 1965 protest at the Federal Building in Los Angeles shows no faces, only body parts — the splayed legs of a black female protester being gripped by a white officer.

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His political activism had its roots in his childhood in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where Charles William Brittin was born May 2, 1928.
He was the youngest of three children of a father who quit teaching and eventually ran a grocery store. "Keenly aware" that his family had "lost status," he came to identify with the oppressed, Brittin recalled in the catalog.
At 15, he moved to the Fairfax district in Los Angeles with his mother after his father died. The liberal student body at Fairfax High School influenced his political views, and he was soon a Marxist "on my way to changing the world," Brittin told The Times in 1999.
He moved again, to Pomona, and after graduating from high school spent several years studying at UCLA.
In the 1950s, he married and divorced twice — and bought his first camera.
His third wife, Barbara, whom he married in 1961, shared his commitment to activism.
While donating money to the Congress of Racial Equality, the couple attended a meeting where the group posed a question: "Who is prepared to be arrested this week?"
"In six months, Barbara was teaching techniques of nonviolent resistance, and I was taking political photographs," Brittin said in The Times in 1999.
He made dramatic black-and-white prints of protests in Southern California and in Mississippi and Louisiana, where he and his wife spent three months in 1965. By the end of the '60s, Brittin was chronicling the Black Panther movement.
"He had an absolutely phenomenal sense of composition," Perchuk said. "Even when he was in the midst of action at a demonstration, he found a perfect way to frame it that conveyed very precisely what was going on."
From 1963 to 1970, Brittin worked as the official photographer in the Los Angeles studio of noted midcentury designers Charles and Ray Eames.
Throughout his career, he also photographed still lifes composed of unlike objects such as a woman's high-heeled feet with an iron-link chain or doll heads.
Brittin's photographs will be featured in "Pacific Standard Time," an exhibit of collected works scheduled to open Oct. 1 at the Getty Center.
When a slowly progressing condition caused his health to deteriorate, he put his cameras away until the 1990s, when his health improved after his transplants.
With Barbara, he lived for decades in Santa Monica Canyon. She died at 74 in 2003. He has no immediate survivors.
Before the civil rights movement, he did not have "the confidence to exploit the opportunities that came my way," Brittin said in the 1999 catalog. "Then, something more important than my personal comfort was at stake, so I was able to be aggressive and do things that seemed unnatural to me."

Jerome Liebling

2012-01-08T08:08:00.000-08:00

Barry Feinstien

2012-01-06T05:18:00.001-08:00

New York in winter, Darlene Niman, photographer

2011-06-17T10:33:00.000-07:00

And it was to this city, whenever I went home, that I always knew I must return, for it was mistress of one's wildest hopes, protector of one's deepest privacies. It was half insane with its noise, violence, and decay, but it gave one the tender security of fulfillment. On winter afternoons, from my office, there were sunsets across Manhattan when the smog itself shimmered and glowed… Despite its difficulties, which become more obvious all the time, one was constantly put to the test by this city, which finally came down to its people; no other place in America had quite such people and they would not allow you to go stale; in the end they were its triumph and its reward. Willie Morris

Situated on an island which I think it will one day cover, it rises like Venice from the sea, and like that fairest of cities in the days of her glory, receives into its lap tribute of all the riches of the earth. Francis Trollope (1827)

Whenever spring comes to New York I can't stand the suggestion of the land that come blowing over the river from New Jersey and I've got to go. So I went. Jack Kerouac

No one as yet has approached the management of New York in a proper spirit; that is to say, regarding it as the shiftless outcome of squalid barbarism and reckless extravagance. No one is likely to do so, because reflections on the long narrow pig-trough are construed as malevolent attacks against the spirit and majesty of the American people, and lead to angry comparisons. Rudyard Kipling

That New York Look, Darlene Niman, photographer

2011-06-17T09:51:00.000-07:00

The city of right angles and tough, damaged people. Pete Hamill

I think you know that when an American stays away from New York too long something happens to him. Perhaps he becomes a little provincial, a little dead and afraid. Sherwood Anderson

There is no place like it, no place with an atom of its glory, pride, and exultancy. It lays its hand upon a man's bowels; he grows drunk with ecstasy; he grows young and full of glory, he feels that he can never die. Walt Whitman

This is New York and there's no law against being annoying William Kunstler

More and more too, the old name absorbs into me Manhattan, 'the place encircled by many swift tides and sparkling waters.' How fit a name for America's great democratic island city! The word itself, how beautiful! how aboriginal! how it seems to rise with tall spires, glistening in sunshine, with such New World atmosphere, vista and action! Walt Whitman

New York is to the nation what the white church spire is to the village - the visible symbol of aspiration and faith, the white plume saying the way is up! E.B. White

An idea, a song, a discovery, an invention, may be born anywhere. But if it is to be communicated, if it is to be tested and compared and appreciated, then someone has always to carry it to the city. Max Ways

And suddenly as I looked back at the skyscrapers of lower New York a queer fancy sprang into my head. They reminded me quite irresistibly of plied-up packing-cases outside a warehouse. I was amazed I had not seen the resemblance before. I could really have believed for a moment that that was what they were, and that presently out of these would come the real thing, palaces and noble places, free, high circumstances, and space and leisure, light and fine living for the sons of men. H.G. Wells

New York City is a great apartment hotel in which everyone lives and no one is at home. Glenway Wescott

It isn't like the rest of the country - it is like a nation itself - more tolerant than the rest in a curious way. Littleness gets swallowed up here. All the viciousness that makes other cities vicious is sucked up and absorbed in New York. John Steinbeck

At night… the streets become rhythmical perspectives of glowing dotted lines, reflections hung upon them in the streets as the wistaria hangs its violet racemes on its trellis. The buildings are shimmering verticality, a gossamer veil, a festive scene-prop hanging there against the black sky to dazzle, entertain, amaze. Frank Lloyd Wright

A crowd pagan as ever imperial Rome was, eager, careless with an animal vigor unlike that of any European crowd that I ever looked at. Ezra Pound

When its 100 degrees in New York, it's 72 in Los Angeles. When its 30 degrees in New York, in Los Angeles it's still 72. However, there are 6 million interesting people in New York, and only 72 in Los Angeles. Neil Simon

There are certainly numberless women of fashion who consider it perfectly natural to go miles down Fifth Avenue, or Madison Avenue, yet for whom a voyage of half a dozen blocks to east or west would be an adventure, almost a dangerous impairment of good breeding. Jules Romains

In dress, habits, manners, provincialism, routine and narrowness, he acquired that charming insolence, that irritating completeness, that sophisticated crassness, that overbalanced poise that makes the Manhattan gentleman so delightfully small in its greatness. O. Henry

Vulgar of manner, overfed,

Overdressed and underbred;

Heartless, Godless, hell's delight,

Rude by day and lewd by night…

Crazed with avarice, lust and rum,

New York, thy name's delirium.

Byron Rufus Newton (1906)

He who touches the soil of Manhattan and the pavement of New York, touches, whenever he knows or not, Walt Whitman. Lewis Mumford

And I turned to her and said "I love this town" Ashburn, Our Lives

It'll be a great place if they ever finish it. O. Henry

New York is Babylon : Brooklyn is the truly Holy City.

New York is the city of envy, office work, and hustle;

Brooklyn is the region of homes and happiness….

There is no hope for New Yorkers, for their glory in

Their skyscraping sins; but in Brooklyn there is the wisdom of the lowly.

Christopher Morley

In Rome I am weighted down by a lack of momentum, the inertia of a spent civilization. In New York I feel plugged into a strong alternating current of hope and despair. Ted Morgan

Unfortunately there are still people in other areas who regard New York City not as part of the United States, but as a sort of excrescence fastened to our Eastern shore and peopled by the less venturesome waves of foreigners who failed to go West to the genuine American frontier. Robert Moses

Wild in New York, Darlene Niman, photograper

2011-06-17T09:19:00.000-07:00

New York, Darlene Niman

2011-06-16T13:16:00.000-07:00

One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years Thomas Wolfe

The present in New York is so powerful that the past is lost. John Jay Chapman

The thing that impressed me then as now about New York . . . was the sharp, and at the same time immense, contrast it showed between the dull and the shrewd, the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor, the wise and the ignorant . . . the strong, or those who ultimately dominated, were so very strong, and the weak so very, very weak-- and so very, very many. Theodore Dreiser

You come to New York to find the ambiance that will evoke your best. You do not necessarily know precisely what that might be, but you come to New York to discover it. James Hillman

New York is the biggest collection of villages in the world. Alistair Cooke

New York is an arrogant city; it has always wanted to be all things to all people, and a surprising amount of the time it has succeeded. It has always been a city of commerce, and the values of commerce have tended to supercede other values. There is no pretense here of excessive gentility, and the rush was always to the new, the large, the prosperous, the fashionable. Paul Goldberger

Cut off as I am, it is inevitable that I should sometimes feel like a shadow walking in a shadowy world. When this happens I ask to be taken to New York City. Always I return home weary but I have the comforting certainty that mankind is real and I myself am not a dream. Helen Keller

When it's three o'clock in New York, it's still 1938 in London. Bette Midler

New York is a different country. Maybe it ought to have a separate government. Everybody thinks differently, acts differently --they just don't know what the hell the rest of the United States is. Henry Ford

Everybody ought to have a lower East Side in their life. Irving Berlin

Over the great bridge, with sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. The city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world. F. Scott Fitzgerald

As for New York City, it is a place apart. There is not its match in any other country in the world. Pearl S. Buck

First New York was a sort of provincial capital, bigger and richer than Manchester or Marseilles, but not much different in its essential spirit. Then, after the war, it became one among half a dozen world cities. Today it has the appearance of standing alone, as the center of culture in the part of the world that still tries to be civilized. Malcolm Cowley

There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless. Simone De Beauvoir

New York is at once cosmopolitan and parochial, a compendium of sentimental certainties. It is in fact the most sentimental of the world's great cities - in its self-congratulation a kind of San Francisco of the East. John Gregory Dunne

New York is the only real city-city. Truman Capote

New York is notoriously the largest and least-loved of any of our great cities. Why should it be loved as a city? It is never the same city for a dozen years altogether. A man born in New York forty years ago finds nothing, absolutely nothing, of the New York he knew. If he chances to stumble upon a few old houses not yet leveled, he is fortunate. But the landmarks, the objects which marked the city to him, as a city, are gone. Harper's (1856)

New York city, the incomparable, the brilliant star city of cities, the forty-ninth state, a law unto itself, the Cyclopean Paradox, the inferno with no-out-of bounds, the supreme expression of both the miseries and the splendors of contemporary civilization, the Macedonia of the United States. It meets the most severe test that may be applied to definition of a metropolis - it stays up all night. But also it becomes a small town when it rains. John Gunther

Willard S. Boyle, Nobel Prize-winning physicist, dies at 86

2011-06-08T17:07:00.001-07:00

Willard S. Boyle, 86, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who co-invented a revolutionary imaging device that propelled traditional film photography into the digital frontier, died May 7 at a hospital in Wallace, Nova Scotia.

Dr. Boyle spent his career at Bell Labs in New Jersey. His death was confirmed by his colleague and Nobel co-recipient, George E. Smith. No cause of death was reported.

Dr. Boyle and Smith received the 2009 Nobel in physics 40 years after they invented the charge-coupled device, or CCD.

It is essentially the electronic eye in digital cameras — a photosensitive microchip that transforms light rays into digital images. The digital image sensor is 1,000 times more sensitive than photographic film and practically made chemical film obsolete.

Today, CCDs can be found in supermarket bar-code scanners, fax machines, digital cameras, camcorders, endoscopes used for laparoscopic surgeries and colonoscopies, the Hubble Space Telescope and NASA’s Mars rover.

Dr. Boyle and Smith shared the Nobel with Charles K. Kao, who made groundbreaking discoveries in the transmission of light in fiber-optic lines.

Highly advanced glass fiber-optics that Kao helped develop are used to connect the world through the Internet. A significant portion of Web traffic is devoted to sharing pictures taken on digital cameras, which use the CCD invented by Dr. Boyle and Smith.

“A young person in the middle of a civil demonstration in Syria can instantly show the rest of the world from his cellphone camera, and it’s because of what Dr. Boyle did with his colleague George Smith at Bell Labs,” H. Frederick Dylla, executive director of the American Institute of Physics, said in an interview. “This little chip makes those pictures possible.”

Willard Sterling Boyle was born Aug. 19, 1924, in Amherst, Nova Scotia. He grew up in Chaudiere, a small logging community in Quebec. His father, the local physician, got around town in a dog sled.

Dr. Boyle was home-schooled by his mother until high school. In World War II, Dr. Boyle served in the Royal Canadian Navy and trained to fly Spitfire fighter planes.

He received a bachelor’s degree from Montreal’s McGill University in 1947 and a master’s degree a year later. He earned his doctorate in physics from McGill in 1950.

He joined Bell Labs in 1953. For a time, he worked for a subsidiary in Washington and helped NASA scientists pick out the ideal lunar landing spot for the Apollo astronauts.

One fall afternoon in 1969, Dr. Boyle invited Smith, his Bell colleague, to join him in his office after lunch for a skull session. The pair often collaborated and exchanged ideas and had come together that day to brainstorm on a new data storage device.

They chalked up some notes on the blackboard in Dr. Boyle’s office and, within an hour, came up with the initial design of the chip.

Once the device had been fabricated, the physicists realized their invention had potential beyond memory storage as an image sensor.

“After making the first couple of imaging devices, we knew for certain that chemistry photography was dead,” Smith told The Washington Post in 2006.

Composed of tiny photocells, the CCD is a silicon chip that captures light and uses electric signals to create a digital version of an image. (The photoelectric effect was theorized by Albert Einstein and won him the 1921 Nobel Prize.)

In addition to his research with Smith, Dr. Boyle worked on patents for lasers. They included the first continuously operating red-light laser, which is used for tattoo removal, and another laser that would later be employed in DVD and CD players.

He retired in 1979 as executive director of research in Bell’s communication science division.

Dr. Boyle was predeceased by a son. Survivors include his wife, Betty, whom he married in 1946; three children; 10 grandchildren; and a great-grandchild.

In an interview, Smith said he remained close friends with Dr. Boyle after retirement. Beyond their Nobel, they shared a love of the sea and often sailed together on Long Island Sound.

Revealed, 35 years on: The face behind Athena's iconic Tennis Girl poster

2011-03-22T12:09:00.000-07:00

By Lauren Paxman
Last updated at 3:35 PM on 22nd March 2011
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She couldn't even play tennis but, back in the late Seventies, Fiona Walker made a lot of men very interested in the sport.

Athena's Tennis Girl poster, which shows Walker's bare bottom as she lifts her short white dress, has been described as one of the sexiest posters ever made.
Now the face behind the iconic pose has been photographed beside the poster, for the first time ever, to help launch Court on Canvas - an exhibition exploring tennis as a subject in art.
Court on Canvas: Fiona Walker poses next to the iconic Athena poster she appeared in in 1976
The exhibition runs from May 27 to September 18 at Birmingham's Barber Institute of Fine Arts, making it a return home for the photograph which was taken at Birmingham University.
Walker's appearance at the launch was tinged with sadness as Martin Elliott, her ex who took the picture, died last April following a ten-year battle with cancer. Both Walker and Elliott had married others since the photo was taken.
Tennis Girl was immediately a top seller for poster producers Athena back in 1976 - although Elliott held onto the copyright and was still getting royalties more than 30 years later.
A teenage boy's bedroom was not complete without the image in the late Seventies and early Eighties, and today the original posters sell for up to £300 on eBay.

Celebrity fans include Jonathan Ross and Ricky Gervais. Both Kylie Minogue and Alan Carr have recreated the pose - to varying degrees of success.
Elliott took the picture in the summer of 1976 after persuading his 18-year-old girlfriend, who was called Fiona Butler at the time, to pose with some borrowed tennis equipment.
Timeless image: A teenage boy's bedroom was not complete without the poster in the Seventies
Elliott said of the original picture: 'People say this image is timeless, and while I'm not sure how long timeless lasts, over 30 years is a good start.'
He also dispelled rumours about the image that claimed the model was male or androgynous saying: 'I can confirm the image is as it seems.'
Walker, on the other hand, always encouraged different theories.
'It gave me quite a buzz because I could secretly smile and say "no you're wrong", every time someone guessed.
"I remember going to a party with my husband and people were saying "is that the girl in the photograph?".
No quite as cheeky: Fiona puts her tennis whites back on in 1980
'They looked me up and down and said "I don't think so".'
Walker's pose today is all the more significant because she has only agreed to being photographed, in relation to the tennis photo, once - back in 1980 when she posed in her whites again but kept a black jacket on throughout the shoot.
The absence of other photos has contributed to creating an air of mystery around the image.
Elliott says: 'If I had a pound for ever model that has laid claim to being the girl, and every photographer that has claimed they took the photo, I'd be a very rich man.'

Paris exhibit honors AP Vietnam War photographer

2011-02-15T07:58:00.000-08:00

(AP) – 3 days ago

PARIS (AP) — A U.S. Army medic peers through dirty bandages on his own head while caring for a wounded comrade. A helicopter winches up the lifeless body of an American soldier, silhouetted against a bare white sky.
Such images from the Vietnam War feature in a new museum exhibit in Paris focusing on Associated Press photographer Henri Huet, who was killed 40 years ago when a helicopter he was riding in was shot down over Laos.
Co-curated by the AP, "Henri Huet: Vietnam" focuses on about 70 photos that he took during the war. The show starts Tuesday and runs through April 3 at the Maison Europeenne de la Photographie in Paris' Marais district.
Huet, who was half-French and half-Vietnamese, and three foreign photographers died Feb. 10, 1971 when the South Vietnamese helicopter they were on was shot down while they covered a cross-border invasion.
Huet, Larry Burrows of Life magazine, Kent Potter of United Press International, and Keizaburo Shimamoto of Newsweek were on board with U.S.-backed Vietnamese forces, killed in the flash of an anti-aircraft gun. Huet was 43.
The exhibit aims to bring to light the impact of Huet on the public's understanding of Vietnam and as a reference for today's generation of photojournalists — in terms of style, shot selection and emotional impact.
Huet captured the pain, fatigue, frustration, grittiness and a gamut of emotions with his black and white photos that made newspaper and magazine covers worldwide throughout the conflict.
He had "a sense of artistry, because he was a painter, he showed his sense of feeling for the Vietnamese," said former AP reporter Richard Pyle, who served as Saigon bureau chief during the war.
"People in Vietnam won prizes, and won accolades, for their work as photographers and the irony of this was that Henri — who was probably the finest combat photographer of his time, maybe in any war ... never got the attention nor the credit that he deserved," Pyle said.
In days long before satellite transmission, the Internet, digital photos and laptop computers, Huet would trek off for days with the U.S. military, and return with a trove of photos shipped to AP headquarters in New York.
Sometimes, a single picture captured the essence of the war.
"You had one Henri Huet picture on the front page of the New York Times, and that was it — that was the battle of Vietnam," said Horst Faas, a Pulitzer Prize-winning AP photographer who worked with Huet in Vietnam.
"There was mud in there, there was frustration in there, a bit of loneliness in there — all these things that a soldier went through in the circumstances, or a civilian, or anyone else," Faas said.
Faas, Pyle and other colleagues have come to Paris for the exhibit, and remembered Huet's compassion, respect for both Vietnamese civilians and U.S. soldiers, and tendency to stay to himself once the work day was done.
"If I had to pick the three finest people that I ever met in my life ... Henri Huet would be one of those three, maybe even No. 1," said Pyle at a news conference Monday

as a rule

2011-01-31T08:51:00.001-08:00

"A man's face as a rule says more, and more interesting things, than his mouth, for it is a compendium of everything his mouth will ever say, in that it is the monogram of all this man's thoughts and aspirations." Arthur Schopenhauer

Snowing the tracks: How an Uxbridge photographer caught a train in action

2011-01-31T04:49:00.000-08:00

By David Stewart, Boston.com Staff

Sometimes a good photo comes from being at the right place at the right time. And sometimes it comes from getting lucky. For David L. Foster, an amateur photographer in Uxbridge, it was a little bit of both that helped him capture the moment a fast-moving train plowed through a pile of snow.
"I knew the moment I pressed the shutter that it was a good shot," Foster said. "If you said 'one, two, three,' it would have been over before you got to two."
Foster, a biotech professional by trade who shoots photos regularly using his digital Canon and publishes his work at davidfoster.net, said he set the camera up this morning in the second floor at his house, just down the street from where the railroad track crosses Hartford Avenue in downtown Uxbridge. He took a shot of the unplowed tracks and waited for a train to pass through.
He was downstairs around noon when he heard a train approaching. "I kind of thought of how I wanted to take the photo," Foster said. "It was the fastest sequence of shots that I can remember shooting."
He managed to get upstairs, grab his camera and fire off several shots in less than a second as a short train on the Providence-Worcester line came plowing through at a fast clip.
"I knew it would come some time during the day," Foster said. "I'm lucky I wasn't in the bathroom or something."
The resulting photos show the fast-moving train plowing through a snow bank on one side of Hartford Avenue. He was happy with the results, but added that he normally doesn't shoot action photos.
"I'm more of a landscape photographer," Foster, 55, who has also worked as a biotech scientific director, said. "I wish I had 20 more seconds."

Student Photographer of the Year

2011-01-31T04:47:00.001-08:00

The Professional Photographers of Washington is pleased to announce applications are being accepted for the 2011 Student Photographer of the Year Award, which is open to all high school seniors in Washington state, graduating in the year 2011. One student will receive the $2,000 scholarship grant, which will be used to further the applicant’s study in the photographic arts.
A panel of professional photographers who are members of the Professional Photographers of Washington will select the finalists.
The Student Photographer of the Year will be chosen based on photographic and scholastic studies and the student’s wish to continue their studies in the photographic arts.
The application postmarked deadline is April 1 and the winner will be announced in June. For more information or to receive an application, contact Anita Weston at (425) 776-4426 . Applications, information and past student finalists are also available online at www.ppw.org.
The Professional Photographers of Washington was founded in 1952.

Vivian Maier

2011-01-21T10:13:00.000-08:00

January 18, 2011 (CHICAGO) (WLS) -- A lifelong nanny, Vivian Maier, was also a photographer who captured images of Chicago's streets and people.

The exhibit, "Finding Vivian Maier. . . Chicago Street Photographer," tells the story of Chicago's streets and its people as seen by Maier, a private person who lived in the shadows. Her work was discovered after she died at the age of 83.

"Very private person and we don't know that she ever shared her photographs with anyone ... much less galleries or museums," said Lanny Silverman, chief curator of exhibitions. "And it's just the beginning."

Maier was a Chicago area nanny, mostly working on the North Shore for more than 40 years. On her off days she would walk the streets of Chicago. Those who know her say she had a hidden personality and talent.

The photos, taken during the 1950s and 1960s, were discovered after her death in 2009.

"She did do a wide range of race, of class. And there are some homeless people and well to do people. She was fascinated by all manner of people," said Silverman.

A Chicagoan, John Maloof, found Maier's 100,000 photos and negatives at an auction. He realized their value and is now showing them.

"I think her best photographs rank up with anyone in the history of photography. I got confirmation of that from some real photo experts," said Silverman.

Only 1,000 of Maier's photos have been sorted through.

"This story has just exploded and gotten to the point where people are aware of it. Now it's time for photo historians and curators to take the next step," said Silverman.

The free exhibit is at the Chicago Cultural Center, (explorechicago.org), until April 3.

Milton Rogovin dies: Documentary photographer was 101

2011-01-21T06:08:00.000-08:00

Milton Rogovin, an optometrist whose spare and compelling portraits of the working poor made him one of the nation's most acclaimed documentary photographers, died Jan. 18 at his home in Buffalo, N.Y., of complications from a heart attack. He was 101.

Mr. Rogovin walked the streets of Buffalo and traveled to Appalachia and South America to capture everyday moments in the lives of the rural and urban underclass: a shirtless, sweating coal miner gazing at the camera, coke oven shovel in hand and goggles pulled back from his eyes. A schoolgirl leaning against a telephone pole, pen tip in mouth, an embodiment of expectation.
"All my life, I've focused on the poor," Mr. Rogovin said. "The rich ones have their own photographers."
His images conjured the work of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, who captured the struggle to survive in the aftermath of the Dust Bowl and the 1929 stock market collapse.
Mr. Rogovin's subject, however, was not the Great Depression but a "chronic depression," New York Times editorial board writer Verlyn Klinkenborg noted in 1999, "that still shapes the lives of the working poor and unemployed."

The pictures were straightforward, showing the dignity of difficult lives without romanticizing pain or toil.
"He lets his subjects present themselves as they want to be seen," art critic Holland Cotter of the Times wrote. "In spirit, the results are candid, unfancy, a step away from snapshots. They are also expertly crafted, and beautiful."
Mr. Rogovin began taking pictures in the late 1950s after his optometry business suffered from his association with Buffalo's Communist Party. He was called the town's "top Red" by a local newspaper and was summoned to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Customers dwindled; his children had few playmates.
"My voice had been silenced," he told The Washington Post in 2003, "so I decided to speak through my camera."
His first project was documenting storefront churches in Buffalo, whose congregants were poor and mostly African American. The pictures were published in Aperture magazine in 1962 with an introduction by W.E.B. Du Bois, who praised them as "astonishingly human and appealing."
Mr. Rogovin and his wife, Anne Snetsky Rogovin - a special education teacher who served in many ways as his colleague - traveled to Appalachia and China to photograph miners. They also went to Chile after Mr. Rogovin sent a letter to the poet Pablo Neruda, who responded with an invitation to visit.
The photographer and the poet later collaborated on a book, "Windows That Open Inward: Images of Chile."
Mr. Rogovin was perhaps best known for pictures taken closer to home, among the crumbling Victorians of Buffalo's heroin-ravaged Lower West Side. At his wife's urging, he returned for decades to photograph the people there, his series of aging and changing families serving as a map of time's passage.
"These aren't cool sociological renderings," wrote Julie Salamon, a Times culture reporter, "but intensely personal evocations of a world whose faces are often missing in a culture that celebrates the beautiful and the powerful."
Mr. Rogovin never told his subjects how to pose. He shot with an old twin-lens Rolleiflex, rarely making more than three or four pictures at one sitting, and printed his images in a basement darkroom.
His archive is held at the Library of Congress, and his photos have appeared in illustrious venues such as the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
He was more pleased that his pictures hung in Buffalo at a community health clinic and in underground subway stations.
"This - THIS! - is where I want my photos shown," he said in 2003, standing on a train platform as a subway car came and went. "This is where the forgotten should be remembered."
Milton Rogovin was born Dec. 30, 1909, in Brooklyn to Jewish immigrants from Lithuania.
His left-leaning politics and sympathy for the underdog were born during the Depression. His parents' dry-goods store failed; a month later, his father died after a heart attack.
He graduated from Columbia University with an optometry degree in 1931 and practiced for several years in Manhattan before moving to Buffalo with his wife.
Anne Rogovin died in 2003. Survivors include three children, Mark Rogovin of Forest Park, Ill., Ellen Rogovin Hart of Melrose Park, Pa., and Paula Rogovin of Teaneck, N.J.; five grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
Mr. Rogovin was self-trained and considered himself an activist, not an artist. "I never do composition - I just shoot," he said. "They tell me about lines. I don't know from anything about lines."

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The Guardians, by Andy Freeberg

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