Photography News

September 13, 2017 /Photography News/ Born 57 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 
Related: 50+ Photography Related Movies

April 21, 2017 /Photography News/ Born 196 years ago today, on 21 April 1821, Philip Henry Delamotte was a British photographer and illustrator, best known for his photographic images of The Crystal Palace in London.

Delamotte was commissioned to record the dis-assembly of the Crystal Palace in 1852, and its reconstruction and expansion at Sydenham in London, a project finished in 1854. His photographic record of the events is one of the best archives of the way the building was constructed and in 1855 he published his two volume work entitled "Photographic Views of the Progress of the Crystal Palace, Sydenham", containing 160 architectural photographs. They were some of the first books in which photographic prints were published.

He also wrote a book entitled "The practice of photography: a manual for students".

Philip Delamotte and pioneering British photographer Roger Fenton were among the first artists to use photography as a way of recording important structures and events following the invention of calotype photography. They were both founding members of the Calotype Club.

Delamotte died on 24 February 1889 at the home of his son-in-law in Bromley.

April 9, 2017 /Photography News/ A portrait of the pioneering photographer, forefather of cinema, showman and murderer Eadweard Muybridge. He was born and died in Kingston upon Thames, but did his most famous work in California - freezing time and starting it up again, so that for the first time people could see how a racing horse's legs moved. He went on to animate the movements of naked ladies, wrestlers, athletes, elephants, cockatoos and his own naked body, projecting his images publicly with a machine he invented and astounding audiences worldwide with the first flickerings of cinema. BBC's Alan Yentob follows in Muybridge's footsteps as he makes - and often changes - his name, and sets off to kill his young wife's lover.

See also: Eadweard Muybridge and the zoopraxiscope. Bonus: his 1882 book

See also: 50+ Photography Related Documentary Films

April 9, 2017 /Photography News/ Born 187 years ago, Eadweard James Muybridge was an English photographer important for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion and in motion-picture projection. He is also known for  his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip used in cinematography.

By 1860, Muybridge was a successful bookseller. During one of his business trips, he suffered severe head injuries in a violent runaway stagecoach crash which injured every passenger on board. The impact of the head trauma was nearly impossible to discern at the time, and certainly impossible to treat. Without doubt though, erratic episodes and dark chapters dogged Muybridge throughout his later years, not least his shooting dead the man whom he suspected of fathering his young wife’s child. 

Arthur P. Shimamura, a psychologist at the University of California Berkeley, has speculated that Muybridge suffered orbitofrontal cortex injuries, which may have led to some of the emotional, eccentric behavior in later years, as well as freeing his creativity from conventional social inhibitions. 

While recuperating in England, Muybridge took up the new field of professional photography sometime between 1861 and 1866. He learned the wet-plate collodion process in England, and may have been influenced by some of the great English photographers of those years, such as Julia Margaret Cameron. Also during this period, Muybridge secured at least two British patents for his inventions.

Galloping horse, animated in 2006, using photos by Eadweard Muybridge.

Muybridge's The Horse in Motion, 1878

Zoopraxiscope disc by Eadweard Muybridge

Jumping; running straight high jump, ca. 1884 - 1887

Plate 539, c. 1887

April 3, 2017 /Photography News/ Josef Breitenbach was born 121 years ago, on 3 April 1896, in Munich, Germany into a middle-class family of Jewish descent. 

Breitenbach began taking photographs while working in the family wine merchant business. Proving less than successful at the latter, he opened his first photographic studio in 1932 which was closed one year later, after Hitler took power. 

Breitenbach was forced to flee to Paris in 1933 where he opened a new studio. He became friends with Andre Breton, yet never truly joined the Surrealist group of his peers. However, he did show his photographs alongside such luminaries as Man Ray, Cartier-Bresson, and Brassaï. During the six years he lived in Paris, he experimented with many newer photographic techniques, mainly superimpression. Most notably, he was one of the first photographers to produce work in color. 

After World War II broke out, he worked  in the civilian corps until he could find passage to America in 1941, where he worked for the American press and taught at several schools. Through the 50s and 60s he did reportage in Asia for the United Nations and other varied businesses. He exhibited extensively in Europe in the 1930s and in the United States from the 40s to the mid-60s, including the Musuem of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Josef Breitenbach died October 7, 1984 in New York.

March 24, 2017 /Photography News/ Born on March 24, 1847 in Leeds, Wordsworth Donisthorpe was an English individualist anarchist and inventor, pioneer of cinematography and chess enthusiast.

On 9 November 1876 Donisthorpe applied for a patent for the Kinesigraph, an apparatus 'to facilitate the taking of a succession of photographs at equal intervals of time, in order to record the changes taking place in or the movements of the object being photographed, and also by means of a succession of pictures so taken ... to give to the eye a representation of the object in continuous movement ...' 

Donisthorpe's Kinesigraph camera was evidently inspired by the 'square motion' wool-combing machine designed by his father, with the 'falling combs' replaced with falling photographic plates. The camera was built, but how well it worked is not recorded. 

On 24 January 1878, a letter from Donisthorpe, 'Talking Photographs', appeared in Nature, in which he suggested that his Kinesigraph, used in conjunction with Edison's recent invention the Phonograph, could produce a talking picture of Prime Minister William Gladstone. 

Each individual photograph was to be illuminated by an electric spark and projected in sequence onto a magic lantern screen. The materials available for photography at that time did not lend themselves to motion picture work, and nothing else is heard from Donisthorpe on this subject until 1889, when he patented a film camera and projector. Louis Le Prince was living in Donisthorpe's home town of Leeds, and it may be that word of Le Prince's 1888 experiments revived Donisthorpe's interest in the problem.

The patent for Donisthorpe's new camera, also called the Kinesigraph, was taken out jointly with William Crofts. It was a unique camera mechanism, which again had more in common with textile machinery than with other photographic devices. A shuttle carrying the film moved upwards as the film itself was pulled down, resulting in the film being stationary relative to the lens during each exposure. Development was entrusted to Crofts, and it was perhaps at a Camera Club lecture that he became aware of Eastman celluloid roll film. The new medium was ideal for their camera. 

Some time between late 1889 and early 1891, Donisthorpe and Crofts set up their Kinesigraph in a building overlooking London's Trafalgar Square, and shot at least one short film. It is an evocative, multi-layered view. Foaming water from one of the famous fountains is framed against a sooty background of the domed National Gallery building, with the bustling traffic of pedestrians and horse-drawn omnibuses; ten frames survive.

  

This footage has not been contested as the first motion picture ever taken of the city of London. 

In 1894 William Crofts died, and any hope that might have remained for the eventual success of the Kinesigraph project died with him, Donisthorpe never being able to acquire backing for the project of moving pictures. 

Donisthorpe later invented a new language (Uropa), and assisted his sons in experiments with colour and sound motion pictures. He died on 30 January 1914.

March 21, 2017 /Photography News/ DIY Photo Booth Inspired by Instagram is a fan project by nineteen-year-old Alexander Morris, from County Antrim, Northern Ireland. The Instagram photo booth is built entirely out of medium density fiberboard and resembles the app’s iconic logo.

This isn’t the kind of project you’ll probably finish on one Saturday. The whole project involves some significant woodshop abilities including cutting, measuring, sanding and painting, not to mention the essential electrical components.

You can find and download the the entire 18-step process at Instructables.

March 19, 2017 /Photography News/ These images reflect the lives of Florida's Seminole Indians and the missionary activities of Deaconess Harriet Bedell among them. The photographs include group portraits of Seminole men, women, and children, as well as images of the Seminoles engaged in a variety of daily work and recreational activities.

Harriet Bedell, missionary and friend to the Seminole Indians of Florida, was born in Buffalo, New York on March 19, 1875. She was trained as a schoolteacher but was inspired several years later by an Episcopalian missionary who spoke at her church describing the many needs of missionary work. In 1906 she applied to, and was accepted by, the New York Training School for Deaconesses, where her one-year course of study included instruction in religious matters, missions, teaching, hygiene, and hospital nursing. Following her training she was sent as a missionary-teacher to the Cheyenne Indians at Whirlwind Mission in Oklahoma. 

Because of her experience in both teaching and working with Indians, in 1916 an Episcopal bishop requested that she consider an assignment in a remote area of Alaska. 

Through speaking engagements following her service in Alaska, Bedell was invited to visit a Seminole Indian reservation in southern Florida. Appalled by their living conditions, she began her campaign to improve the quality of life among the Mikasuki-Seminole Indians by living and working with them, not merely teaching them. She sought to revive the doll making and basket weaving skills which had become nearly extinct. She encouraged the incorporation of the intricate patchwork designs made by Indian women into articles of clothing for both women and men. Sales from the arts and crafts store at Blades Cross Mission helped to provide improved income for the Mikasuki-Seminoles.

Bedell emphasized health and education rather than religious conversion in her work with the Seminoles; their spiritual and physical comfort was more important to her than religious conversion, and her work and friendship with the Seminoles of Florida reflected those values.

Courtesy of the State Archives of Florida 

March 16, 2017 /Photography News/ Born 218 years ago today, on March 16, 1799, Anna Atkins (maiden name Anna Children) was the first person to print and publish her own book illustrated entirely by photography.

Instead of traditional letterpress printing, the book's handwritten text and illustrations were created by the cyanotype method. Atkins printed and published Part I of British Algae in 1843 and in doing so established photography as an accurate medium for scientific illustration.

Atkins learned directly about the invention of photography through her correspondence with its inventor, William Henry Fox Talbot. Although she owned a camera, she used only the cameraless photogenic drawing technique to produce all of her botanical images. With the assistance of Anne Dixon, Atkins created albums of cyanotype photogenic drawings of her botanical specimens. She learned the cyanotype printing method through its inventor, the astronomer and scientist Sir John Herschel, a family friend. 

Anna Atkins produced a total of three volumes of Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions between 1843 and 1853. Only 17 copies of the book are known to exist, in various states of completeness. Copies are now held by, among other institutions: 

Because of the book's rarity and historical importance, it is quite expensive. One copy of the book with 411 plates in three volumes sold for GBP 133,500 at auction in 1996. Another copy with 382 prints in two volumes which was owned by scientist Robert Hunt (1807-1887) sold for GBP 229,250 at auction in 2004.

Atkins was known to have had access to a camera by 1841. Some sources claim that Atkins was the first female photographer, while other sources name Constance Talbot, the wife of William Fox Talbot, as the first female photographer. As no camera-based photographs by Anna Atkins or any photographs by Constance Talbot survive, the issue may never be resolved.

Photos courtesy of the New York Public Library

Photo: Barat Ali Batoor

March 15, 2017 /Photography News/ Photojournalist Barat Ali Batoor was living in Afghanistan — until his risky work forced him to leave the country. But for Batoor, a member of a displaced ethnic group called the Hazara, moving home to Pakistan proved dangerous too. And finding a safer place wasn't as simple as buying a plane ticket. Instead, he was forced to pay a human smuggler, and join the deadly tidal wave of migrants seeking asylum by boat. He documents the harrowing ocean trip with powerful photographs.

March 14, 2017 /Photography News/ Born into a wealthy Jewish family in New York 94 years ago on March 14, 1923, Diane Arbus made her reputation photographing people on the margins of society: losers, misfits, nudists, transvestites, prostitutes, the mentally retarded, sideshow freaks, and almost anyone who seemed not to fit in easily with her upper middle class background. And occasionally she photographed celebrities, sometimes to their dismay.

Diane Arbus, Untitled (3), 1970-71, © The Estate of Diane Arbus. Courtesy of Masters of Photography

At age 18 Diane married Allan Arbus (divorced 1969), an employee at her family’s store. Before separating, they worked collaboratively, first taking photographs and creating advertisements for the store, then creating commercial fashion photography for Harper’s Bazaar, Show, Esquire, Glamour, The New York Times, and Vogue.

March 10, 2017 /Photography News/ Born on March 10, 1907, Toni Frissell (or Antoinette Frissell Bacon) was an American photographer, known for her fashion photography, World War II photographs, portraits of famous Americans and Europeans, children, and women from all walks of life.

Frissell worked with many famous photographers of the day, as an apprentice to Cecil Beaton, and with advice from Edward Steichen. She initially worked for Vogue in 1931 as a fashion photographer for Vogue in 1931, and later took photographs for Harper's Bazaar. Her fashion photos, even of evening gowns and such, were often notable for their outdoor settings, emphasizing active women.

In 1941, Frissell volunteered her photographic services to the American Red Cross. Later she worked for the Eighth Army Air Force and became the official photographer of the Women's Army Corps. On their behalf, she took thousands of images of nurses, front-line soldiers, WACs, African-American airmen, and orphaned children. She traveled to the European front twice. Her moving photographs of military women and African American fighter pilots in the elite 332d Fighter Group (the "Tuskegee Airmen") were used to encourage public support for women and African Americans in the military.

In the 1950s, she took informal portraits of the famous and powerful in the United States and Europe, including Winston Churchill, Eleanor Roosevelt, and John F. and Jacqueline Kennedy, and worked for Sports Illustrated and Life magazines. Continuing her interest in active women and sports, she was the first woman on the staff of Sports Illustrated in 1953, and continued to be one of very few female sport photographers for several decades.

In later work she concentrated on photographing women from all walks of life, often as a commentary on the human condition.

Her photographs illustrated the following books:

• A Child's Garden of Verses (1944)

• Bermuda: The Happy Island (1946)

• Mother Goose (1948)

• The King Ranch, 1939-1944 (1965)

• Tethered, by Amy MacKinnon (August 2008)

March 7, 2017 /Photography News/ Born 252 years ago on March 7, 1765, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce was a French inventor, most noted for producing the world's first known photograph in 1825.

By the age of thirty, Niépce had been a professor at an Oratorian college, a staff officer in the French army, and the Administrator of the district of Nice, France. In 1795, Niepce resigned from his position as administrator of Nice to returned to Chalon-sur-Saône --his birthplace-- and pursue research with his brother Claude.

Never one to stick with one pursuit for too long, he had become fascinated with popular art of lithography by 1813. Since Niepce himself had no artistic talent, his son Isadore would make the designs for his lithographs. Niepce would place engravings (which he made transparent) on plates coated with light-sensitive varnishes and expose them to sunlight through a process he called heliography, which literally means "sun writing".

Niépce took what is believed to be the world’s first photogravure etching, in 1822, of an engraving of Pope Pius VII, but the original was later destroyed when he attempted to duplicate it. The earliest surviving photogravure etchings by Niépce are of a 17th century engraving of a man with a horse and of an engraving of a woman with a spinning wheel.

When his son Isadore was called up for military service, Niépce decided to find a way to produce images directly from nature.

Niépce sterted experimenting with silver chloride, which darkens when exposed to light, but eventually looked to bitumen, which he used in his first successful attempt at capturing nature photographically. He dissolved bitumen in lavender oil, a solvent often used in varnishes, and coated the sheet of pewter with this light capturing mixture. He placed the sheet inside a camera obscura to capture the picture, and eight hours later removed it and washed it with lavender oil to remove the unexposed bitumen. He began experimenting to set optical images in 1793. Some of his early experiments made images, but they faded very fast. The earliest known, surviving example of a Niépce photograph was created in 1825.

Starting in 1829 he began collaborating on improved photographic processes with Louis Daguerre, and together they developed the physautotype, a process that used lavender oil. The partnership lasted until Niépce’s death in 1833. Daguerre continued with experimentation, eventually developing a process that little resembled that of Niépce and naming it  the "Daguerréotype".

The Niépce Prize has been awarded annually since 1955 to a professional photographer who has lived and worked in France for over 3 years. It was introduced in honour of Nièpce by Albert Plécy of the l'Association Gens d'Images.

March 6, 2017 /Photography News/ Born 97 years ago today, on March 6, 1920, Marion A. Carpenter was the first female National Press Photographer to cover Washington, D.C., the White House and to travel with a US President.

After studying photography in St. Paul when was in her 20s, she moved to Washington to take a job at the Times-Herald before setting her sights on the White House job. Soon she became one of President Harry S. Truman's favorite photographers, being the only woman among a handful of photographers who traveled with Truman.

Her unique status made critics of some of her male colleagues, such as Washington Times-Herald columnist Tris Coffin, who complained in print that she used her feminine charms -- "smiled and teased" -- to persuade politicians to pose for her. Later, when Carpenter saw Coffin in the Senate restaurant, she sloshed a bowl of navy bean soup over his face, then stalked out. A photograph of the incident was published with the headline "Carpenter Nails Coffin."

An undated photo from Acme Telephoto: "Free-lance photographer Marion Carpenter demonstrates how she threw a bowl of Senate bean soup at columnist Tris Coffin in the Senate Dining room today. She objected to some remarks he made about her in his copyright column. Her aim was good and she scored a direct hit."

According to what she told her friends late in life, a love affair with a married man may have helped end her career prematurely.

Carpenter's marriage to a Navy officer who abused her ended in divorce. In Washington, she fell in love with a Capitol journalist. When the affair ended, Carpenter remarried. Her new husband, a radio announcer, took her to Denver, where they had a son. By 1951, the marriage -- and her career -- were over. She was 31.

Back in St. Paul, Carpenter ran a wedding photo business and worked as a nurse to support her mother and child. Her later life is not well known.

Marion Carpenter died on October 29, 2002, at the age of 82 in the house on Margaret Street, nearly destitute, and alone except for her Rottweiler, Karl.

Among Carpenter's prized belongings is a book about Harry Truman, marked at a page where a photograph shows the president smelling a cherry blossom. Also in her belongings when she died were photos she took of Truman, which the president inscribed to "Miss Carpenter." One of those photos, which showed Truman striding uphill toward the Washington Monument, bears the message: "It's good exercise if you keep it up, but not for high-heeled shoes, Miss Carpenter." Even when she climbed a ladder to the top of the Capitol dome to take a picture almost 300 feet above ground in a skirt, newsmen found it hard to just be nice. A front-page photo of her, high on the ladder, was captioned: "This picture ought to prove you never can tell what a woman photographer will do next."

Detail of a Christmas card (Photograph 58-649) sent to President Truman in 1949 from Marion Carpenter

The White House Correspondents' Association which Carpenter belonged to, has a picture of her with other members of the WHCA who covered President Truman taken at the White House. Even though she was a member of the Association, because she was a woman she was not allowed to attend the annual WHCA dinners, which 14 Presidents had attended since 1924. It was not until 1962, when President John F. Kennedy stated he would not attend the annual dinner, that the ban on women members was lifted.

Several of Carpenter's cameras auctioned with her estate are now considered historic items. Her first camera was a Seneca Competitor View. Other cameras were the 'Rolleicord III' produced in late 1949 by the Rollei-Werke Franke and Heidecke Corporation, and the Iloca Rapid B, a German rangefinder camera from the 1950s.

A book first published in 2003 by Ramona Rush, Seeking Equity for Women in Journalism and Mass Communication Education: A 30-Year Update, describes Carpenter in the preface as a "newly found pioneer White House news photographer" and provides several pages on her life. A book published in 2007 by Anne Commire, Dictionary of Women Worldwide: 25,000 Women Through the Ages, has an article on Marion Carpenter. The St. Paul Camera Club issues an annual "Marion Carpenter Award" in her honor for the best monochrome photojournalism print, also known as the "Annual Monochrome Photojournalism Print Award."