I’m reading M. W. Marien’s great book “Photography. A cultural History” and i am amazed by the photographs the pioneers of photography created.
“View from the Window at Le Gras”- 1826 - The photograph which is considered to be the first one.
“Boulevard du Temple”- 1839 - The first photograph to depict a person.
“Leaves of Orchidea” - 1839 - Photogenic drawing negative
“The use of Aether for Anesthesia” - 1847
“Mrs Elizabeth Hall, Newhaven fishwife” - 1843/46
Categories: Art · Books · History of Photography · Photoblog · Photography
“I am an activist, no artist” - Jacob Holdt
Jacob Holdt (born 1947 in Copenhagen, Denmark) is a Danish photographer and author. Arriving in America in the 1970’s, he spent several years hitchhiking across the country. He stayed in over 400 homes, most of them belonging to impovershed minorities, and took thousands of photographs. His photos seek to demonstrate the daily struggle of the American underclass and capture the emotions they experience. He will often juxtapose a poor or homeless person with symbols of “white oppression” or “white power.”
OUT of 100,000 miles of hitchhiking across the United States, out of 3,000 photographs, out of myriad adventures in a five-year odyssey in the 1970’s, a Danish self-styled vagabond named Jacob Holdt has fashioned a visually powerful examination of America’s impoverished.
[...]
When his odyssey began, Mr. Holdt was en route from Canada, where he had been working, to South America, which he hoped to visit. But he never made it. His letters home aroused such disbelief that his family sent him a camera, and Mr. Holdt, who was not a photographer, began compiling a record.
In the course of his travels, he was held up at gunpoint, he met a former slave said to be 134 years old, he ran guns for the Indians at Wounded Knee; he attended a Ku Klux Klan meeting where a cross was burned; he stayed with a black woman whose home was firebombed, apparently because of her hospitality, and whose brother burned to death in the attack.
Find an online copy of “American Pictures” at Jacob Holdt’s website
Categories: Books · Photoessay · Photography
“Postmodernist art accepts the world as an endless hall of mirrors, as a place where all we are is images, [...], and where all we know are images [...]. There is no place in the postmodern world for a belief in the authenticitiy of experience, in the sanctitiy of the individual artist’s vision, in genius or originality. What postmodernist art finally tells us is that things have been used up, that we are at the end of the line, that we are all prisoners of what we see. Clearly these are disconcerting and radical ideas, and it takes no great imagination to see that photography, as a nearly indiscriminate producer of images, is in large parts resposible for them.”
Andy Grundberg - “The Crisis of the Real”
Categories: Books · Photoblog · Photography · Theory of Photography
