Photography News

October 3, 2018 /Photography News/ Born 209 years ago today, on October 3, 1809, Thomas Martin Easterly was one of the most prominent and well-known daguerreotypists in the Midwest United States during the 1850s, with his studio becoming one of the first permanent art galleries in Missouri.

By 1844, Easterly had begun practicing photography taking outdoor photographs of architectural landmarks and scenic sites in Vermont. Among his earliest daguerreotypes, made a decade before outdoor photography was popular or profitable, those of the Winooski and Connecticut rivers are the only known examples to be self-consciously influenced by the romantic landscape paintings of the Hudson River School artists. He was also the first and only daguerreotypist to identify his work using engraved signatures and descriptive captions.

In the fall of 1845, Easterly traveled to the Midwest United States and toured the Mississippi River with Frederick F. Webb as representatives of the Daguerreotype Art Union. The two gained some notoriety from their photography of the criminals convicted of the murder of George Davenport in October of that year. Iowa newspapers reported that Easterly and Webb had achieved a "splendid likeness" of the men shortly before their execution.

Easterly soon became popular for his portraits of prominent residents of St. Louis and visiting celebrities which were displayed in a temporary gallery on Glasgow Row. One of these portraits was that of Chief Keokuk taken March 1847. He also took a daguerreotype of a lightning bolt, one of the first recorded "instantaneous" photographic images, while in St. Louis. This was later recorded in the Iowa Sentinel as an "Astonishing Achievement in Art". Before returning to Vermont in August 1847, the St. Louis Reveille described his as an "unrivaled daguerreotypist".

Easterly was brought back to Missouri by John Ostrander, founder of the first daguerreotype gallery in St. Louis, in early 1848. Preparing for an extended "tour of the south", Ostringer asked Easterly to manage his portrait gallery. Esterly would continue running the gallery when Ostringer died a short time later. Many of his unique streetscapes depicting mid-19th-century urban life were taken from the window's of Ostringer's gallery. In June 1850, he married schoolteacher Anna Miriam Bailey and settled in St. Louis permanently. 

By the 1860s most photographers had abandoned the daguerreotype process for the albumen and collodion processes. Easterly felt that the daguerreotype was an art form and refused to adopt new techniques, urging the public to "save your old daguerreotypes for you will never see their like again". His studio suffered from declining patronage, and he himself developed poor health, probably due to the mercury poisoning often associated with the daguerreotype process.  

Despite the declining interest for pictures on silver, he was able to maintain his gallery until it burned in a fire in 1865. He was forced to move to a smaller location and continued working in near obscurity until his death in St. Louis on March 12, 1882.

After his death, his wife sold most of his personal collection to John Scholton, another noted St. Louis photographer. The Scholton family eventually donated the plates to the Missouri Historical Society where they remained for nearly a century before being rediscovered during the 1980s by art scholars studying pre-American Civil War photography.

Although his reputation was limited to the Midwest during his lifetime, Easterly is considered to have been one of the foremost experts in the field of daguerreotype photography in the United States during the mid-to-late 19th century.

The most complete appreciation of Easterly's life and work, with 233 illustrations is Dolores Kilgo's book “Likeness and Landscape: Thomas M. Easterly and the Art of the Daguerreotype” published by the Missouri Historical Society Press in 1994. An exhibit of the same name accompanied the book.

September 24, 2018 /Photography News/ In early years of American movies, Jacksonville, Florida, experienced a brief turn in the spotlight as one of the hubs for filmmaking on the east coast. 

The Vim Comedy Company, based in Jacksonville and New York, was one of several film studios operating in the Jacksonville area in the first three decades of the 20th century. 

Most of the images presented here were collected by one of the Vim actors, William "Billy" Bletcher (September 24, 1894 – January 5, 1979), while working at the studio between 1915 and 1917. 

Before going out of business in 1917, it employed such stars as Oliver “Babe” Hardy, Ethel Burton, Walter Stull, and Kate Price, as well as Swedish-born director Arvid Gillstrom.  

The Florida Photographic Collection contains more than 158,000 images, representing the most complete portrait of Florida available.

Courtesy of the Florida Memory / State Library & Archives of Florida

September 16, 2018 /Photography News/  General Motors, also known as GM, was founded on 16 September 1908, in Flint, Michigan, as a holding company for Buick, then controlled by William C. Durant. At the turn of the 20th century there were fewer than 8,000 automobiles in America and Durant had become a leading manufacturer of horse-drawn vehicles in Flint, MI, before making his foray into the automotive industry. Today GM employs more than 200,000 people around the world. 

General Motors Company. Oldsmobiles 1897 - 1938. Photographs courtesy of the New York Public Library.

September 13, 2018 /Photography News/ Born 58 years ago, on 13 September 1960 (d. 27 July 1994), Kevin Carter was an award-winning South African photojournalist and member of the Bang-Bang Club. He was the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for his photograph depicting the 1993 famine in Sudan. Following the winning of the Pulitzer Prize he committed suicide at the age of 33. 

In March 1993, while on a trip to Sudan, Carter was preparing to photograph a starving toddler trying to reach a feeding center when a hooded vulture landed nearby. Carter reported taking the picture, because it was his "job title", and leaving.

Sold to the New York Times, the photograph first appeared on 26 March 1993 and was carried in many other newspapers around the world. Hundreds of people contacted the Times to ask the fate of the girl. The paper reported that it was unknown whether she had managed to reach the feeding center. On May 23, 14 months after capturing that memorable scene, Carter walked up to the platform in the classical rotunda of Columbia University's Low Memorial Library and received the Pulitzer Prize for feature photography. 

With the success of the image came a lot of controversy, and questions were raised about the ethics of taking such a photograph. An article printed in 1994 in the St Petersberg Times commented on the morality of Carters actions, ‘the man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene,’ (Stamets cited in Ricchiardi, 1999). 

The National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) have a ‘Code of Ethics’ which sets out certain ethical responsibilities when carrying out journalistic work, one reads as thus, ‘while photographing subjects do not intentionally contribute to, alter, or seek to alter or influence events’ (NPPA, 2010). Considering this, one can say Carter was objective and documented what he saw, capturing the severity of the situation in Sudan. But does this alleviate him from the responsibilities of being a good human being?

On 27 July 1994 Carter drove his way to the Braamfonte near the Field and Study Centre, an area where he used to play as a child, and took his own life by taping one end of a hose to his pickup truck’s exhaust pipe and running the other end to the driver's side window. He died of carbon monoxide poisoning, aged 33. Portions of Carter's suicide note read: 

Carter's story is depicted in the 2010 feature film, The Bang-Bang-Club in which he was played by Taylor Kitsch.

Related: New York Post Runs Pic of Man About to be Hit by Subway Train, Sparks Photojournalism Ethics Debate 
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September 7, 2018 /Photography News/ Weather they are cut, pasted, folded, or printed, photography paper crafts are always fun to make. Here are three easy ideas for your inspiration, so put away your real camera and try them out.  

Box: Camera Type EOS650

Artist:ERI KAMEI

Download and instructions: http://cp.c-ij.com/en/contents/CNT-0020915/index.html

Download and instructions: http://cp.c-ij.com/en/contents/CNT-0020913/index.html

Download and instructions: http://cp.c-ij.com/en/contents/CNT-0020917/index.html

DIY: Free printable DSLR lens hoods

How to make a pinhole camera from concrete

September 1, 2018 /Photography News/ 

The Second World War (1939-1945) is generally accepted to have begun 79 years ago today, on 1 September 1939, with the invasion of Poland by Germany, and subsequent declarations of war on Germany by France, Britain and most of the countries of the British Empire and Commonwealth.

These photographs show the men and women who served in World War II, 1939-1945. They are from the collections of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, and the Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands.

Photographic portrait of Louis-Napoléon / Napoleon III (1852) by Gustave Le Gray

Alexandre Dumas (father), 1860, by Gustave Le Gray

Camel transporting artillery, Egypt (1866), by Gustave Le Gray

• Improvements on paper negatives, specifically waxing them before exposure making the paper more receptive to fine detail.
• A collodion process published in 1850 but which was theoretical at best. The invention of the wet collodion method to produce a negative on a glass plate is now credited to Frederick Scott Archer who published his process in 1851.
• Combination printing, creating seascapes by using one negative for the water and one negative for the sky at a time where it was impossible to have at the same time the sky and the sea on a picture due to the too extreme luminosity range.

Three Batak warriors with spears and swords in front of a wooden construction. A dog lies between the two girders at the left. Circa 1870

Batak war canoe near Lake Toba, Sumatra, 1870

Deli river, circa 1870

Batak family, circa 1870

Portrait of a Batak woman, circa 1870

Batak village, circa 1870

Portrait of workers, Deli, circa 1870

Batak, circa 1870

Dyak women, Borneo, 1860s

Rev. Habb preaching to the Klings (South Indians) in Penang, 1867