Posts Tagged ‘photography’

08 AUGUST, 2011

Where Children Sleep: James Mollison’s Poignant Photographs

By: Maria Popova

What the Amazon rainforest has to do with the Kaisut Desert and Fifth Avenue luxury.

On the heels of this morning’s homage to where children read and learn comes a curious look at where they sleep. That’s exactly what Kenyan-born, English-raised, Venice-based documentary photographer James Mollison explores in Where Children Sleep — a remarkable series capturing the diversity of and, often, disparity between children’s lives around the world through portraits of their bedrooms. The project began on a brief to engage with children’s rights and morphed into a thoughtful meditation on poverty and privilege, its 56 images spanning from the stone quarries of Nepal to the farming provinces of China to the silver spoons of Fifth Avenue.

From the start, I didn’t want it just to be about ‘needy children’ in the developing world, but rather something more inclusive, about children from all types of situations. It seemed to make sense to photograph the children themselves, too, but separately from their bedrooms, using a neutral background.” ~ James Mollison

Perhaps most interestingly, the book was written and designed as an empathy tool for 9-to-13-year-olds to better understand the lives of other children around the world, but it is also very much a poignant photographic essay on human rights for the adult reader.

7-year-old Indira works at a granite quarry and lives in a one-room house near Katmandu, Nepal, with her parents, brother and sister.

4-year-old Jasmine has participated in over 100 child beauty pageants and lives in a large house in the Kentucky countryside.

4-year-old Romanian boy who shares a mattress with his family in the outskirts of Rome.

8-year-old Justin plays football, basketball and baseball. He lives in a four-bedroom house in New Jersey.

Alyssa lives in a small wooden house with her family in Appalachia.

8-year-old Ahkohxet belongs to the Kraho tribe and lives in Brazil's Amazon basin.

9-year-old Dong shares a room with his parents, sister and grandfather, growing rice and sugar cane in China's Yunnan Province.

9-year-old Delanie aspires to be a fashion designer and lives with her parents and younger siblings in a large house in New Jersey.

9-year-old Tsvika and his siblings share a bedroom in an apartment in the West Bank, in a gated Orthodox Jewish community known as Beitar Illit.

9-year-old Jamie shares a top-floor apartment on New York's Fifth Avenue with his parents and three siblings. The family's two other homes are in Spain and the Hamptons.

10-year-old Ryuta is a champion sumo-wrestler living in Tokyo with his family.

12-year-old Lamine sleeps in a room shared with several other boys in the Koranic school in their Senegalese village.

11-year-old Joey, who killed his first deer when he was seven, lives in Kentucky with his family.

14-year-old Irkena is a member of the semi-nomadic Rendille tribe in Kenya and lives with his mother in a temporary homestead in the Kaisut Desert.

14-year-old Prena is a domestic worker in Nepal and lives in a cell-like room in the attic of the house where she works in Katmandu.

14-year-old Erien slept on the floor of her favela abode in Rio de Janeiro until the late stages of her pregnancy.

15-year-old Risa is training to be a geisha and shares a teahouse with 13 women in Kyoto, Japan.

Mollisey is represented by MAP and Flatland Gallery, and published by Chris Boot.

Where Children Sleep is reminiscent of Peter Menzels’s voyeuristic tours of the world through people’s diets and possessions, and JeongMee Yoon’s look at the conditioning of children’s gender identity through the color schemes of their bedrooms. The book’s glow-in-the-dark cover, a-la Radioactive, is a wonderfully playful cherry on top.

All images courtesy of James Mollison via The New York Times

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02 AUGUST, 2011

Rare Early Photographs of Musicians Around the World

By: Maria Popova

Playing the hurdy-gurdy, or why African-American jazz bands were banned in Australia until 1954.

Music is one of humanity’s oldest and strongest forms of social glue, yet our collective memory has retained precious little of music’s communal history outside the Western tradition and before the days of rock concerts. Collected here are some fascinating archival images of music-making from around the world and across time, culled from several excellent Flickr sets compiled by musician Sam Bennett.

Quartet of Musicians in Meiji-era Japan

Okinawa Soba posted several CC licensed stereoimages by T. Enami and others documenting life in late 19th and early 20th century Japan (the Meiji period). The original image, circa 1901 and by an unknown photographer, is presented for parallel viewing and depicts a quartet of Japanese musicians. It is but one of many fascinating stereo compositions. This animated gif version exploits motion parallax to give a stereo illusion without eyestrain, to see what the photographer envisioned.

Dancing Dervishes, Cairo

Half of a stereoview (NPG, Berlin ca. 1910)

Village orchestra of Ruthenian and Jewish musicians

Verecke, Bereg County, 1895

Chinese band postcard

Hari Dasu, India. c. 1900?

Hand captioned 'Indian Juggler,' but subsequently identified as Hari Dasu

Egypt

NYPL photographs and prints of Egypt and Syria

Hungary

Photograph by Buchsbaum Gyula - Debrecen

Mexican picnic

Photo by Hugo Brehme, Mexico, D.F.

Street musicians

Photograph shows two men, sitting on bales of hay and playing instruments outside a barn or stable. One man plays guitar and the other plays a bowed instrument similar to a cello; both men simultaneously play kazoos.

Real photo postcard

Verso reads: 'This is myself and my youngest brother Bert. We had our heads clipped and then shaved and look like old men. The side view is my self.'

Fi. Musician? (LOC), ca. 1910-1915

Street musician playing a hurdy-gurdy

St. Marks Place

Photograph by James Jowers, 1968

The Colored Idea Band of Sonny Clay arrives in Sydney, 1928 / Sam Hood

The band entered Sydney Harbour playing their newly composed 'Australian Stomp' on deck, with their dancers performing. After good reviews, the Truth newspaper organised for the band to be raided. They were found with Australian women and deported. African American bands were banned from visiting until 1954. The Library has photographs of the Louis Armstrong tour, the first Afro-American entertainer to visit after the ban was lifted, and of the Harlem Blackbirds in 1955, the first Afro-American group to visit.

For more archival fascination, be sure to see these collections of vintage photographs of ballet dancers from the 1930s-1950s, lantern slides of Egypt in the early 1900s, and hand-colored images of life in early-20th-century Japan.

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Tags: culture knowledge music photography vintage world

28 JULY, 2011

Ethnic Diversity in Russia 100 Year Ago, Restored in Color

By: Maria Popova

From peasants to emirs, or nomads have to do with the political cornerstones of world history.

The Library of Congress is a treasure trove of archival gems — from antique maps of the universe to the vintage design gems of the Works Progress Administration to fascinating films from the 1940s romanticizing bookmaking. Today, we turn to The Empire That Was Russia, a curious online exhibition of life in Russia in the beginning of the 20th century. Culled here are some remarkable archival images of ethnic diversity in Russia during that period, which at the time included not only all the countries that would eventually become the Soviet Union, but also present-day Finland and Poland. With its 150 million people, of whom only about half were ethnic Russians, the country was home to some fascinating subcultures, captured here in restored and colored negatives by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii , photographer to the Tsar, with captions by the exhibition team.

The Emir of Bukhara, 1911

The Emir of Bukhara, Alim Khan (1880-1944), poses solemnly for his portrait, taken in 1911 shortly after his accession. As ruler of an autonomous city-state in Islamic Central Asia, the Emir presided over the internal affairs of his emirate as absolute monarch, although since the mid-1800s Bukhara had been a vassal state of the Russian Empire. With the establishment of Soviet power in Bukhara in 1920, the Emir fled to Afghanistan where he died in 1944.

Russian Peasant Girls, 1909

Young Russian peasant women offer berries to visitors to their izba, a traditional wooden house, in a rural area along the Sheksna River near the small town of Kirillov.

Nomadic Kazakhs on the Steppe, 1911

Many Central Asiatic peoples, for example the Kirghiz, Kazakhs, and Uzbeks, lived nomadic lives on the steppes, valleys, and deserts, migrating seasonally from one place to another as opportunities for obtaining food, water, and shelter changed. Shown here is a young Kazakh family in colorful traditional dress moving across the Golodnaia (or 'Hungry') steppe in present-day Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.

Profile of a Nomad, ca. 1907-1915

In this portrait, Prokudin-Gorksii captures the traditional dress, jewelry, and hairstyle of an Uzbek woman standing on a richly decorated carpet at the entrance to a yurt, a portable tent used for housing by the nomadic peoples of Central Asia. After conquering Turkestan in the mid 1800s, the Russian government exerted strong pressure on the nomadic peoples to adopt a sedentary lifestyle and settle permanently in villages, towns, and cities.

Portrait of a Dagestani Couple

A couple in traditional dress poses for a portrait in the mountainous interior region of Gunib on the north slope of the Caucasus Mountains in what is today the Dagestan Republic of the Russian Federation.

Prisoners in a Zindan with Guard, ca. 1907-1915

Five inmates stare out from a zindan, a traditional Central Asian prison--in essence a pit in the earth with a low structure built on top. The guard, with Russian rifle and bayonet, is attired in Russian-style uniform and boots.

Jewish Children with their Teacher, 1911

Samarkand, an ancient commercial, intellectual, and spiritual center on the Silk Road from Europe to China, developed a remarkably diverse population, including Tajiks, Persians, Uzbeks, Arabs, Jews, and Russians. Samarkand, and all of West Turkestan, was incorporated into the Russian Empire in the middle of the nineteenth century and has retained its ethnic diversity up to the present. Prokudin-Gorskii captures here a group of Jewish boys, in traditional dress, studying with their teacher.

Chinese Foreman at the Chakva Tea Farm, ca. 1907-1915

A Chinese foreman poses with established tea plants and new plantings at a tea farm and processing plant in Chakva, a small town just north of Batumi. The semi-tropical climate of the Black Sea coast in modern-day Georgia was ideal for growing tea.

Study of a Dagestani Man, ca. 1907-1915

Dagestan, meaning 'land of mountains' in the Turkic languages, contains a population consisting of many nationalities, including Avars, Lezgi, Noghay, Kumuck, and Tabasarans. Pictured here is a Sunni Muslim man of undetermined nationality wearing traditional dress and headgear, with a sheathed dagger at his side.

Russian Children on a Hillside, ca. 1909

Children sit on the side of a hill near a church and bell-tower in the countryside near White Lake, in the north of European Russia.

Russian Settlers in the Borderlands, ca. 1907-1915

Ethnic Russian settlers to the Mugan Steppe region, south of the Caucasus Mountains and west of the Caspian Sea, established a small settlement named Grafovka. The region is immediately north of the border with Persia. Settlement of Russians in non-European parts of the empire, and particularly in border regions, was encouraged by official government policy and accounts for much of the Russian migration to Siberia, the Far East, and the Caucasus regions.

Learn more about the fascinating process of making color images from Prokudin-Gorskii’s negatives, a technique known as “Digichromatography,” made all the more challenging by the fact that no known replica or illustration of the camera that Prokudin-Gorskii used exists today.

Hat tip @brennanyoung

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Tags: culture history knowledge photography vintage

27 JULY, 2011

Hurricane Story: A Haunting Analog Photo-Memoir of Katrina, Partway Between Nightmare and Fairy Tale

By: Maria Popova

What red glitter shoes have to do with one family’s plight to find order in chaos.

When Hurricane Katrina swept across New Orleans in August of 2005, killing 1,836 people, damaging and destroying over 76,000 houses, and leaving many homeless, photographer Jennifer Shaw found solace in capturing the turmoil with a plastic Holga camera. Hers is a story both incredible and true — from the dramatic birth of her first child on the very day of Katrina’s first strike, to her struggle with depression and her husband’s rage episodes, to their eventual return to New Orleans in time for their son’s first Mardi Gras. Hurricane Story (public library) is part memoir, part fairy tale, part poetic story of exile and homecoming, told through 46 beautiful, dreamlike images and simple but powerful prose. The Holga’s rudimentary functionality, with its limited control over exposure, focus and lighting, further intensifies the story’s haunting, cinematic feel, drawing you into a seemingly surreal world that sprang from an extraordinary and brave reality.

New York Times columnist and Significant Objects author Rob Walker writes in the foreword:

Any city worth living in strikes a balance between order and chaos. I guess any life worth living strikes that balance too. In late August 2005, Jennifer Shaw’s city, and I can only assume her life, tilted too far in one direction. The remarkable series of forty-six images collected in Hurricane Story tells the tale, and in doing so sets the balance right again.