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SquareAmerica - A gallery of vintage snapshots & vernacular photography

www.squareamerica.com

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Kyle Cassidy traveled 15,000 miles over two years photographing Americans in their homes and asking one question:

“Why do you own a gun?”

“I love history and I love old mechanical devices — guns are both. I also enjoy target shooting.”

“When I was diagnosed with cancer I found myself and my family in need of protection. I was too old to fight, too sick to run, and since cancer took my vocal cords, I couldn’t yell for help. I purchased
my first ever firearm.”

“My family had guns the whole time I was a kid. then i went off and joined the army and went away and come back. I have guns now largely for the same reason I have fire extinguishers in the house and spare tires in the car. I’m a self reliant kind of guy. and there could come a time when I need to protect my family and i’m a self reliant kind of guy.”

“I have one for self protection. I was raised to never rely on anyone else to protect me or watch my back. It took me a year to pick out one that I liked.”

Check out http://www.armedamerica.org/ for more informations and photos!

LOUIS STETTNER has had a long and distinguished career in photography. Starting at the age of thirteen, encouraged by Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, his photographs are now in such permanent collections as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

While there have been significant exhibitions in the United States and Europe, his work remains relatively unknown to the general public. Greatly appreciated by fellow photographers and discerning collectors, the problem as photography critic Kelly Wise aptly states: “rarely is his work shown in breadth.”

Slowly a legend has blossomed about his early photographs (1947 - 1972) that has strongly influenced young photographers. Yet its true scope and depth has been only available to those
fortunate enough to visit his print room.

There is a most stirring and perceptive Introduction by his teacher and lifelong friend, the famous French photographer Brassai (Stettner is the only photographer to be honored): “Stettner has always been fully conscious that the role of the photographer is not to turn away from all reference to reality, but on the contrary to express a profound experience with it.”

From: Stettner’s Biography on Bonni Benrubi Gallery (pdf)

photos: Bonni Benrubi Gallery

C|O Berlin is presenting “Weegee’s story” in the Postfuhramt Berlin.

[photo International Center of Photography Midtown

Exhibition
WEEGEEs STORY
Photographs from the Berinson Collection
24.02. to 06.05.07
Postfuhramt

Guided tour 15.04.07 . 3 pm

Weegee’s photographs have an immediate, almost violent impact: they are uncompromising, unprettified. His subjects are criminals, the homeless, accident victims and the assassinated, people on the edges of existence – but also include lovers, people on daytrips and people attending jazz clubs, variety shows and cinemas. The pictures are unique historic documents of everyday life and of the chaos and catastrophes in the New York of the 1930s and 1940s.

Weegee, whose real name was Arthur Fellig, was born in 1899 in Zloczow near Lemberg, Galicia (present-day Zolochiv, Ukraine) and died in New York in 1968. He is the prototype of the modern photojournalist and one of the most important photographers in the 20th century. From 1935 onwards, he worked as a freelance police reporter, adopting the ironic moniker Weegee the Famous. In the mid-1940s, he gave up photoreporting and turned to advertising photography for a variety of magazines such as Life, Look and Vogue, and became a photo caricaturist and a producer of short films.

Gallery-owner and collector Hendrik A. Berinson has compiled over a 20-year period the single most important and most extensive collection of Weegees work. C/O Berlin presents the first comprehensive showing of Weegee’s work in Berlin, including more than 220 black-and-white exclusively vintage prints and of videos by and about Weegee.

[source] C|O Berlin website

[photos] Side Photographic Gallery

photos: Paul D’Amato - The Mexican Community on the South Side of Chicago