Getty Images reveals unseen’ London photos Images published here for first time
Posted on August 4, 2008 - Filed Under Digital, Photo | Leave a Comment
magazine can reveal never-before-seen images of London, plucked from Getty Images’ Hulton archive, ahead of their first public showing next month.
Images include Daleks ‘invading’ a London street in 1965 and people being rescued when the River Thames broke its banks in 1928.
The collection also includes scenes of everyday life, such as men enjoying jellied eels in the East End and a crowd of shoppers on Petticoat Lane.
The previously unpublished pictures (below) have been revealed ahead of the publication of a new book by called ‘London Through a Lens’.
They are due to go on show in a free exhibition of the same name at the Getty Images Gallery in London from 21 August-27 September.
‘This exhibition is as exhilaratingly diverse as the capital itself,’ said Getty Images gallery director Louise Garczewska.
‘What unifies the images is the prevailing feel of London – the buzz that is hard to put into words but would account for why 7.5 million Londoners call it the best city in the world.’
Picture (below):
Credit: London Stereoscopic Company/Getty Images
Picture (below): Credit: Fox Photos/Getty Images
Book Review: Joyce Tenneson – A Life In Photography 1968 – 2008
Posted on August 3, 2008 - Filed Under Culture, Photo | Leave a Comment
Considered by American Photo magazine to be one of the ten most influential women photographers in the history of photography, Joyce Tenneson has had her work published in LIFE, Esquire, Newsweek, and The New York Times Magazine. She is the author of over 12 prior books, including the best seller “Wise Women,” and she is the recipient of numerous awards.
In A Life In Photography 1968 – 2008, Tenneson provides a retrospective of a career that spans four decades. Beginning with her first black-and-white studies in self-portraiture, through her transformations period, through her work with light, color and into the exploration of maturing women, as well as trying to look to what is ahead.
Joyce Tenneson – A Life In Photography 1968 – 2008 is divided into several sections which encompass these periods. While not everything is covered, it does seem to take into account each decade.
“Early Work” examines the early personal journey that is played out by someone who is trying to find themselves in photography. Her photographic career started while she was modeling, when someone gave her a camera. These are very autobiographical images that are a record of the first steps in a long career. They include the self portraits as well as the images of her son Alex. These cover the late ’60s and ’70s.
“Transformation” is based on the first Tenneson book to feature her color work. Published in 1993, it was timed to coincide with a traveling exhibition. These images present the full range of her personal color work since she began to work in color in the mid ’80s.
“Light Warriors” is a selection of images from her 2000 book that paints women as a mystic and timeless vision of the female psyche by using a bold departure into the colors of luminous dark browns and blacks. It is the universal quest for the spiritual warrior trying to find their own uniqueness.
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Behind the Scenes on Hollywood’s Biggest Movies
Posted on August 3, 2008 - Filed Under News, Photo | Leave a Comment
In the entire history of Hollywood photography, no photographer has ever documented the craft of filmmaking the way David Strick has.
There have been many notable celebrity portraitists, from George Hurrell to Herb Ritts, who have captured the glamour of movie stars. There also have been many photojournalists, from Henri Cartier-Bresson to Douglas Kirkland, who have documented movie making. But no one has done it the way Strick has been doing it for the past 30 years or so.
Strick’s images capture the often funny and sometimes poignant interplay between the reality of the filmmaking process and the fantasy of the movies themselves. These are the moments when the actuality of craft and creativity are transformed into what Strick calls Hollywood’s “industrial magic.”
“The end product of this process affects all of us so deeply, but no one ever really has paid much attention to the work itself,” he notes.
Strick published his first collection of images in the 1987 book Our Hollywood, and for many years his work was seen regularly in Premiere magazine. Beginning this summer he became a contributor to the Los Angeles Times with a weekly feature called “David Strick’s Hollywood Backlot”that can be seen both online and in the Thursday edition of the newspaper.
This publishing arrangement gives Strick a unique platform for his visual ideas and has reignited his career. He talked with American Photo recently about working in two media at once, as well as his singular vision of Hollywood.
American Photo: Not many photographers are given regular features by newspapers, so you really are breaking new ground with this new job.
David Strick: Newspapers and magazines have lots of writers who do regular columns, but this is a fairly unusual situation for a photographer. I think the most interesting part is working both for the newspaper’s online and print products.
AP: Why is that?
DS: The web is changing everything in our culture. Magazines and newspapers, where I have always published my pictures, are trying to cope with it. And the entertainment business is facing real challenges related to the Internet — diminished advertising, lower DVD sales, and piracy. I wanted to explore how the Internet could work in a positive way for all the sides I deal with.
AP: Please explain more.
DS: For one thing, the Internet has become very important for movie studios because of the way movies are marketed now. The whole idea of success now is based on opening weekends — if a movie doesn’t have a big opening, it’s going to be bad news. So generating attention to upcoming movies is the Holy Grail of all publicity efforts. About 80 percent of film reviews are now read online.
AP: That’s is an amazing fact.
DS: Also, the viral aspect of the Internet has been an essential ingredient in the marketing of movies. Studios start putting out trailers for films a year in advance of the release date. One of the advantages of early publicity like that is that the studios can take advantage of the viral aspect of the Internet. One of the first movies we featured when my column debuted in the L.A. Times was Twilight, which has a huge viral audience of dedicated fans from the books it was based on. The studios were very happy to get that early publicity from my project.
AP: Is it hard to get access to movie sets?
DS: Yes, even for someone with a track record like me. Studios and production companies are not interested in supporting somebody’s art project. They’ve got their own art projects to worry about. If you’re going to be on their sets, you’ve got to be able to show that what you’re bringing to the table is a positive thing for them.
AP: How did you take up photography?
DS: I was a typical high school photo geek. I took a picture that won an award from the Boys Club of America — it was probably the best picture I’ve ever taken, and I’m still trying to recapture that magic. Sad, isn’t it? I did a year at UCLA and later studied at the California Institute of the Arts, but I never graduated. I went to work at a startup weekly called L.A. Newspaper, but it only last six months until the investor’s money ran out. But we had some great people: Roger Black was the art director, Terry McDonnell was an associate editor, and Barry Siegel, who later won a Pulitzer for the L.A. Times, was a reporter. It was a children’s crusade.
AP: And after that?
DS: I started freelancing and worked as a stringer for the New York Times. I started putting together magazine assignments and began to come into the orbit of Hollywood assignments. Then in 1975 I shot a story for the New York Times about the decline of the city of Hollywood, and it was published so disappointingly that I realized I was turning into a complete hack. I realized that if I wanted to do anything of interest I was going to have to self-assign and do more personal projects. So I began this work on Hollywood.
AP: You have a very particular take on Hollywood and filmmaking . . .
DS: I grew up in Los Angeles and my family has been connected with the movies for three generations. My great aunt was Gale Sondergaard, who won the first academy award for best supporting actress for the movie Anthony Adverse. Her husband was Herbert Biberman, a producer. My father was a television director and producer, and my mother worked as a publicist for Universal for a time. So I have this background. But my family was always also a little on the outside of the Hollywood world — they were left-wing intellectuals. My aunt Gale and her husband were blacklisted during the McCarthy era. We were more outsider-insider Hollywood people.
AP: That’s a pretty good description of your work.
DS: With my background, I probably started with a baseline that was different from the way most other photographers looked at Hollywood. Throughout the history of Hollywood, photography has been the happy handmaiden of the studio publicity machine, with the eager partnership of magazines and newspapers. There really hasn’t been much photography that has gone beyond that kind of standard celebrity-publicity photography. The very first time I was on a movie set, I wondered why all the other photographers were doing pictures that were so predictable.
AP: How does your work differ, would you say?
DS: I’m as amazed by the craft of filmmaking as anyone else, but I wanted to go beyond that. I’m interested in something that’s not on the surface, if I can possibly find it. My style is completely documentary — everything un-posed, candid, which is important, because when you’re dealing with Hollywood, you’re dealing with a high degree of artificiality. Recapitulating artificiality by posing actors and directors in imaginative ways doesn’t appeal to me.
AP: Has working for the web changed the way you shoot?
DS: Absolutely. When you shoot for print you are constrained, whether you even realize it or not, by the format. Magazines need a lead picture, they need a horizontal, and they have room for one or two pictures on the following pages, maybe. Then you might shoot a few extras if you think the subject will syndicate well. But with the web, you can run an infinite number of pictures, and you can shoot in many various ways.
Jade Dragon Mountain
Posted on August 3, 2008 - Filed Under Photo | Leave a Comment
“Permanently snowcapped, an indomitable mountain that nobody has managed to climb successfully to the peak”. Taken by Jasmine