About the top image: A still from Incoming by Richard Mosse. Photograph: Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York and carlier|gebauer, Berlin.
Perhaps the most widely discussed exhibition of the year, Mosse’s vast three-screen video installation was not strictly photography, but addressed all the issues that the medium is freighted with as it negotiates the post-truth world. Shot on a hi-tech military surveillance camera that registers body heat from as far away as 30km, Incoming reimagined the contemporary refugee crisis as a Ballardian dystopian drama populated by spectral figures moving slowly through an alien landscape. Beautifully observed moments of heightened intimacy – a lone figure praying to Mecca amid the tumult around him – provide breathing space in an almost overwhelming audiovisual installation.
Something that I don´t often do. However, with my dear friend Knut, his brother Asle and their wonderful friends in Norway it all went well. We caught lots of fish. Fishing is very relaxing. Also taking care of the net after is contemplative. We had so much of everything and nothing to talk about. First time I managed to photograph fishing as well.
Together with Avedon, Penn, Steichen, Strand, Arbus, Cartier-Bresson, Albert Watson and a few more, he is one of the truly great photographers. For me. They are all different and perhaps I should not compare them. So I don´t. Read the article from The Guardian, by Sean O `Hagan.
See the images and imagine the sound that he recorded. 😊 Pelle
Smith took many famous pictures, but also taped hours of audio of jazz greats, writers and artists of the day in his New York loft. A new book explores his strange world
Smith was perhaps the single most important American photographer in the development of the editorial photo essay. His visual narratives, usually published in Life magazine, were often brutally atmospheric. He evoked the horrors of the second world war in the Pacific, where he was injured by mortar fire, and chronicled the working life of Dr Ernest Ceriani in the small town of Kremmling, Colorado, in his 1948 series, Country Doctor, now recognised as the first extended editorial photo story.
In 1955, Smith became a member of the Magnum picture agency, travelling to Pittsburgh for his first assignment, which entailed producing 100 photographs in three weeks to mark the city’s first centenary. He worked on the project for three years, producing around 21,000 photographs. Today, his legacy is maintained by the W Eugene Smith Memorial Fund, which celebrates and encourages the kind of humanistic photography he pioneered, if not the impossible tasks he set himself and his beleaguered editors.
A US soldier during the final days of fighting to gain control of the island of Saipan from occupying Japanese forces during the second world war. Photograph: W Eugene Smith/Life/GettySmoke pours from the chimneys of an Ohio steel mill in a 1949 picture for Life magazine. Photograph: W Eugene Smith/Life/GettyCountry doctor Ernest Ceriani photographed after having performed a caesarean section during which both baby and mother died due to complications. The picture, taken in Kremmling, Colorado, was part of Smith’s groundbreaking photo essay for Life magazine in 1948. Photograph: W Eugene Smith/Life/Getty
Once a photographer, always a photographer. You don´t have a career for 50 years if you´re not a photographer by heart. A great title for the book. 😊 Pelle
He was best known for his Pulitzer prize-winning photo, Saigon Execution, but Eddie Adams won over 500 awards for his work, throughout a 50-year career. Starting as a photographer in the marines, he covered war zones, refugees, riots and celebrities. Eddie Adams: Bigger Than The Frame is published by the University of Texas Press.
Great to see these images from a young Bod Dylan! I was happy to attend his first concert here in Stockholm last Saturday after that he received The Nobel price. A great concert by a great artist. He has changd his hat. 😊 Pelle
As Bob Dylan accepts his Nobel prize for literature this weekend, an exhibition of photographs of him on the cusp of international fame is planned to open in New York. The photographer Ted Russell first met Dylan in 1961 and his intimate pictures of Dylan performing, and at home, are the subject of a show at the Steven Kasher Gallery featuring dozens of images never before seen in the city. Bob Dylan NYC 1961–1964 opens on 20 April and will run until 3 June.
Wes Bell’s series “Snag,” inspired by the death of his mother, takes a beautiful and simple idea and infuses an ordinary scene with great emotional power. There is beauty, loss and poetry in every frame. After 20 years in New York working as an international fashion photographer, Bell returned to his birthplace and to fine-art photography in Alberta, Canada.
In describing this work, Bell said: “Three years ago, I was leaving for the airport after saying goodbye to my mother. She was dying of cancer. On the long drive across the Alberta prairie, I found myself distracted by flapping remnants of plastic bags, caught in barbed-wire fences that lined the ditches. Whipped violently by the wind, they were left shredded and lacerated, but trapped nonetheless in the no man’s land of boundary fences, neither here nor there. Thinking about mortality, pain and death in the context of my mother’s terminal illness, these forgotten shreds of plastic took on a deeper significance — Snag.”
Loss and remembrance are universal, and Bell makes feeling those emotions accessible and visible.
Being a music nerd myself I find these images wonderful. Some truly amazing images and stories to go with them. Some images are composed while other let you hear the wings of music history. All the way from Sinatra to Beastie Boys. And now Dylan is coming to Stockholm, still going strong.
In a new documentary about his life and work, Harry Benson: Shoot First, his famous subjects-turned-admirers.
“what makes his photographs so memorable: they’re surprisingly candid and humanizing in a way that’s often lost in more controlled photography settings. “I hate studio pictures,” he told Rolling Stone earlier this week. “I like everything out of control. Like myself!”
The project is organised by Cafe Art, a social enterprise that hosts exhibitions of artwork by homeless people. Their first calendar was created back in 2012
When 105 cameras were handed out to homeless people at St Paul’s Cathedral, the aim was to give them a voice through photography – and it’s now resulted in a calendar of the best images, MyLondon 2017, launched tonight at Spitalfields Art Market, London.
Each photographer was first given training by the Royal Photographic Society, who have since been mentoring the photographers every two weeks to continue to develop their skills
Cafe Art says its aims are to empower homeless people, allow them to tell their stories and raise awareness of their plight
The images selected for the calendar were picked via a public vote in August
‘Painting, drawing, sketching, photography, sculpturing and craft making are some of the many activities that homeless people or those who are socially excluded are encouraged to do to help boost self-esteem, confidence and self-worth,’ Cafe Art say. ‘It is also therapeutic in that it acts as an outlet to channel their feelings, frustrations, anger, but also hope and optimism for the future’
A young boy is injured during a Russian airstrike that targeted the Qaterji neighborhood at sunset. An hour after he and his family were rescued, the whole building collapsed. His parents and 3 siblings were injured in the attack as well. (Photo by Mahmoud Rslan)
This photograph kicked me in my stomach and it hit my heart. Like the one with the child drowned on the beach. Or too many others of the same subject. I feel ill and helpless. Why do people have to fight over land, race, religion. Or other stupid things? I have just sent a small donation to Doctors Without Borders. Can you? Or any other organization that you think can help.
On a photographers mind 