FOUND PHOTOS: 4x5 Glass Plates

These photographs belong to Elizabeth Avedon/All Rights Reserved

I found a package of turn of the century 4x5 glass plates in a junk store. I gave them as a present to a photographer many years ago, who gave me prints made from the plates. I just found these three.

ZWELETHU MTHETHWA: An Interview With Larissa Leclair

from the “Interiors” series
Photograph (c) Zwelethu Mthethwa /All Rights Reserved

From the series Sugar Cane, 2006
Photograph (c) Zwelethu Mthethwa /All Rights Reserved

from the “Interiors” series
Photograph (c) Zwelethu Mthethwa /All Rights Reserved

Aug 1st Last Day to Enter
Flak Photo Zwelethu Mthethwa Book Give-Away!
Enter Here!

Larissa Leclair teamed with Flak Photo's Weekend series featuring photographs by Zwelethu Mthethwa. Larissa corresponded with Zwelethu as he prepared to travel from South Africa to the U.S. for the opening of “Inner Views” at the Studio Museum in Harlem, July 15-Oct 24. They talked about his monograph, his Sugar Cane series, the South African photography community, and about the current show at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Below is an excerpt from their Interview courtesy of Larissa Leclair.

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LL: Your work as a whole addresses the economic and political reality of marginalized communities primarily in South Africa. Can you talk about your personal interest in these communities and professions (miners, sugarcane workers, etc.). Are you personally an outsider or is there more of a connection to these people and circumstances -politically, economically, culturally?

ZM: The work is about my personal history and personal observation. I grew up in contact with these different communities all the time. I was always interested in how the migrant workers would be ostracized from the main community, which was the community that I came from. The migrant workers were always seen as “the other” – they looked different, talked different, dressed different – they were just so different. As a kid I was curious to understand the dynamics of these differences, mainly because we were all black, I assumed we were all the same. Growing up as an artist I came to realize that I was also an outsider because with my views on life I probably didn’t belong to any of the communities, even the mainstream community.

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My first attraction to the sugar cane workers was that they were wearing skirts, and that they looked to me like Samurai warriors. I then found out that, not only were they wearing skirts, but also many other layers of clothing. This was odd to me because Durban is an incredibly hot and humid area. I thought they must be crazy to be wearing so many clothes and still doing manual labor. I discovered, through speaking with them, that the reason was to protect themselves from the burning ground and soot (sugar cane is burnt before harvested); from the very sharp leaves of the cane; and also from the many snakes that like to live in sugar cane fields. The most difficult part of taking these photographs was stopping them from working. These guys are paid according to the weight of sugar cane that they harvest; there is no hourly rate. I felt guilty that I was interrupting and taking their money away from them by asking them to pose for me. So this forced me to move in and out as quickly as possible, interrupting their flow of production as little as possible.

Read The Entire Interview Here

Zwelethu Mthethwa: Inner Views
Exhibition July 15-October 24, 2010

The Studio Museum in Harlem
144 West 125th Street, NYC

CARL COREY: Wisconsin Taverns

2664-Marty-Chippewa Club, Durand, WI
Photograph (c) Carl Corey /All Rights Reserved

2760-Moccasin Bar-Hayward, WI
Photograph (c) Carl Corey /All Rights Reserved

2774-Tom Theis-Rodeo Bar, Tomahawk, WI

Photograph (c) Carl Corey /All Rights Reserved

Editor: Andy Adams of Flak Photo
Publication: Wisconsin People & Ideas Magazine
Essay: Carl Corey's WISCONSIN TAVERNS
Check it out HERE!

NEW ORLEANS: Ancestors and Descendants

Antelope Priests Shaking Rattles, 1901
Hand-colored glass lantern slide by Sumner W. Matteson
Middle American Research Institute/Tulane University

George Hubbard Pepper slide from around 1899
Middle American Research Institute/Tulane University

Portrait of Hopi Maiden with Hair Whorls, 1901
Hand-colored glass lantern slide by Sumner W. Matteson
Middle American Research Institute/Tulane University

Leisure Time at George Pepper's Tent
Hand-colored glass lantern slide
Middle American Research Institute/Tulane University

"Ancestors and Descendants: Ancient Southwestern America at the Dawn of the 20th Century." Photography, Artifacts, and Archival Research from the George Hubbard Pepper Native American Archive.

The New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) unveiled a little-known Native American archive this past week. Ancestors and Descendants presents a rare opportunity to see a collection that was put together over one hundred years ago by George H. Pepper, a museum ethnologist and early collector and scholar of Native American art. The exhibition, curated by Paul J. Tarver NOMA’s Curator of Pre-Columbian and Native American Art and co-curated by Cristin J. Nunez, includes 140 photographs and 150 objects from Pepper's personal collection. Pepper used textiles, pottery, baskets and other Pueblo and Navajo objects in his lectures. Many of these objects have never been seen by the general public since 1924. "Even in his lifetime, Pepper could only display a handful of objects with a few dozen images he projected through a magic lantern," said Tarver, "This is the first time the breadth of the archive has been researched and displayed."

"In the New Orleans show, An entire gallery is devoted to his relics of snake dances, the Hopis’ prayers for rain. The museum catalog ($24.95) quotes his unpublished eyewitness accounts, which turned up in the Tulane paperwork. Hopi tribesmen would collect a hundred snakes at a time, and then priests would emit a “weird droning” over the “writhing twisting forms of the reptiles,” Pepper wrote. Priests used their teeth to carry the snakes and waved around feathers to distract them. “Snake maidens” showered cornmeal on the reptiles, which were then released “in the sacred earth-mouths in the rock,” Pepper reported." (from NY Times, July 22, 2010)

The New Orleans Museum of Art
July 24-October 24, 2010

BEIJING MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY: Beijing Tourist

Photograph (c) William Avedon /All Rights Reserved

Half a ram on display

Photograph (c) William Avedon /All Rights Reserved

Photograph (c) William Avedon /All Rights Reserved

Photograph (c) William Avedon /All Rights Reserved

"Who Is the Most Dangerous Animal?"
Sign over fun-house mirror
Photograph (c) William Avedon /All Rights Reserved

"I too have become Amber!"
(Chinese translation)
Photograph (c) William Avedon /All Rights Reserved

Photograph (c) William Avedon /All Rights Reserved

"Human Being Exhibition Room" reveals the process of how human beings stem from the animal. So let's enter into the nature museum and find the key to the nature enigma.–China Through a Lens

BEIJING MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY
"Opening in the entire year without the resting day"
No. 126 Tianqiao South Street, Beijing

ZWELETHU MTHETHWA: Flak Photo Weekend

Zwelethu Mthethwa Monograph from The Aperture Foundation
Flak Photo is giving away 3 copies of this book to their Facebook fans!
Exhibition The Studio Museum in Harlem July 15-Oct 24, 2010

From the series Sugar Cane, 2003
Photograph (c) Zwelethu Mthethwa /All Rights Reserved

From the series Sugar Cane, 2007

Photograph (c) Zwelethu Mthethwa /All Rights Reserved

Untitled
Photograph (c) Zwelethu Mthethwa /All Rights Reserved

From the series Interiors, documenting the domestic lives of migrant workers around Johannesburg, South Africa. Photograph (c) Zwelethu Mthethwa /All Rights Reserved

Flak Photo July Weekend features work of South African photographer, Zwelethu Mthethwa. There's a link to the beautiful Photographer Video's. Worth the time to view or just listen to them. And incredibly Flak Photo is giving away 3 copies of the book to their Facebook fans! Join here

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"Since Apartheid's fall in 1994, South African photography has exploded from the grip of censorship onto the world stage. A key figure in this movement is Zwelethu Mthethwa, whose portraits powerfully frame black South Africans as dignified and defiant individuals, even under the duress of social and economic hardship.

Photographing in urban and rural industrial landscapes, Mthethwa documents a range of aspects in present-day South Africa, from domestic life and the environment to landscape and labor issues. His stunning portraits often portray rural immigrants on the margins of South African cities, revealing the efforts of his subjects to maintain their cultural identities through their choices in clothing, and the decoration of their dwellings. His singular oeuvre challenges both traditional conventions of African commercial studio photography and Western documentary work, marking a transition away from the typical exoticized images that encapsulate what curator Okwui Enwezor describes as "afro pessimism."

Zwelethu Mthethwa: Inner Views
Exhibition July 15-October 24, 2010

The Studio Museum in Harlem
144 West 125th Street, NYC

CAMILLE SILVY: 19th Century Modern Life

Adelina Patti as La Somnambula, 1880-1881.
(Patti was a highly acclaimed Opera diva of the time)
Photograph (c) National Portrait Gallery, London

Sarah Forbes Bonetta Davies, Goddaughter of Queen Victoria, with her husband James Pinson Labulo Davies. September 15, 1862. Photograph (c) National Portrait Gallery, London

Camille Silvy with a Boy, August 1859
Photograph (c) National Portrait Gallery, London

View of the House, ca 1862
Photograph (c) National Portrait Gallery, London

Henry Ker Seymer's Dog, 1860
(HKS was a Member of Parliament for Dorset)
Photograph (c) National Portrait Gallery, London

John Robert Townshend, 1st Earl Sydney, 1860
Photograph (c) National Portrait Gallery, London

Honore de Balzac, 1862
Photograph (c) National Portrait Gallery, London

CAMILLE SILVY
Photographer of Modern Life: 1834-1910

"Camille Silvy was a pioneer of early photography and one of the greatest French photographers of the nineteenth century. Working under the patronage of Queen Victoria, Silvy photographed royalty, aristocrats and celebrities. He also portrayed uncelebrated people, the professional classes and country gentry, their wives, children and servants. The results offer a unique glimpse into nineteenth-century society through the eyes of one of photography's outstanding innovators.

This exhibition includes many remarkable images which have not been exhibited since the 1860s. The over 100 images, including a large number of carte de visites, focus on a ten-year creative burst from 1857-67 working in Algiers, rural France, Paris and London, and illustrates how Silvy pioneered many now familiar branches of the medium including theatre, fashion and street photography."

The National Portrait Gallery London
July 15-Oct 24, 2010

BRAD MOORE: Fahey/Klein

Rose Room, Tustin, California, 2008
Photograph (c) Brad Moore /All Rights Reserved

Trini Circle, Westminster, California, 2006

Photograph (c) Brad Moore /All Rights Reserved

Barbara & Brea, Fullerton, California, 2008
Photograph (c) Brad Moore /All Rights Reserved

Korean Methodist, Fullerton, California, 2008
Photograph (c) Brad Moore /All Rights Reserved

"These photographs were shot in modest, well-worn, suburban cities in central and inland Southern California. Built in the 1950s and 60s, these cities provided a new home and future to a post-war population. This is where I grew up and, after 25 years, I returned. The areas I remembered were fading away, and I was struck by the simultaneous growth and decline. Initially, it was the buildings that interested me; I shot them in formal, almost symmetrical compositions. Then I began shooting the surrounding shrubbery with the same architectural approach. I liked the way the buildings and plants worked together, so that is how the project evolved. I have opted to avoid traditional, documentary-style photography; instead I have photographed in primarily static compositions, reflecting change, irony and evolution."

Brad Moore’s photographs are included in the collection of SF MoMA, and exhibited at the Museum of Photographic Arts, (MOPA), San Diego. Read An Interview with Brad Moore by Barbara Tannenbaum, Director of Curatorial Affairs, the Akron Art Museum

Brad Moore Photographs
Fahey/Klein Gallery
July 15-Sept 4, 2010

DANNY LYON: The Civil Rights Movement

Danny Lyon's Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, with a foreword by Julian Bond, an early leader in the American Civil Rights Movement. (Twin Palms Publishers)

Demonstrators block traffic to protest segregation and unfair hiring practices in downtown Atlanta. (early 1960's) Photograph © Danny Lyon/ Twin Palms Publishers

Arrested for demonstrating, teenage girls are kept in a stockade in the countryside. They had no beds and no sanitary facilities. Lyon photographed them through the broken glass of the barred windows. (early 1960's) Photograph © Danny Lyon/ Twin Palms Publishers

"An important historical record of the Southern Civil Rights Movement"

Pictures, eyewitness reports, and text take the reader inside the Civil Rights Movement creating an authentic work of history

If you don't know the story of the real-life murders of these three young civil rights workers in 1964, rent Mississippi Burning (Gene Hackman, Willem Dafoe, Frances McDormand) based on the FBI investigation.

Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement
Danny Lyon

"In the summer of 1962, Danny Lyon packed a Nikon Reflex and an old Leica in an army bag and hitchhiked south. Within a week he was in jail in Albany, Georgia, looking through the bars at another prisoner, Martin Luther King, Jr. Lyon soon became the first staff photographer for the Atlanta-based Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which already had a reputation as one of the most committed and confrontational groups fighting for civil rights.

In Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, Danny Lyon tells the compelling story of how a handful of dedicated young people, both black and white, forged one of the most successful grassroots organizations in American history. The book depicts some of the most violent and dramatic moments of Civil Rights Movement, including Black Monday in Danville, Virginia; the aftermath of the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham; the March on Washington in 1964; and the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1962. Lyon’s photos were taken when he was the first staff photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

The book also includes a selection of historic SNCC documents such as press releases, telephone logs, letters, and minutes of meetings. Pictures, eyewitness reports, and text take the reader inside the Civil Rights Movement, creating both a work of art and an authentic work of history." (text from Twin Palms Publishers)

Danny Lyon gained broad recognition as a photographer, filmmaker, and writer. Working in the style called New Journalism, which involved immersing himself and becoming a participant in a given subject, Lyon photographed motorcyclists in the Midwest and documented life within the Texas prison system. Lyon’s talent was recognized by the Guggenheim Foundation, which awarded him a fellowship in photography in 1969 and another, in film, a decade later. Lyons has had one-person exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona.

Twin Palms Publishers

Other Notable Photographers of the American Civil Rights Movement

iPhone PHOTOGRAPHY: Sean Perry

iPhone Photograph (c) Sean Perry /All Rights Reserved

iPhone Photograph (c) Sean Perry /All Rights Reserved

iPhone Photograph (c) Sean Perry /All Rights Reserved

iPhone Photograph (c) Sean Perry /All Rights Reserved

iPhone Photograph (c) Sean Perry /All Rights Reserved

I think Sean Perry's iPhone Photographs are magical.
Sean Perry: Website + Interview

There’s a new group of websites and blogs dedicated solely to “iPhone Photography.“ Here's just a few iPhone Sites: One, Two, Three, Four...add to the list below.

PUBLISHING IN YOUR HANDS: Join the PhotoBook Discussion

Publishing in Your Hands
A roundtable discussion with
Andy Adams, David Bram, Darius Himes, and Melanie McWhorter

Join the Discussion!

Posted on FRACTION BLOG: "At the end of last year (2009) Miki Johnson and Andy Adams coordinated a "cross-blog" discussion about the future of photography books. Over forty bloggers participated with a range of amateur and professional voices piping in and adding their thoughts to the mix. The interest in the subject of photobooks* has continued unabated and various fairs devoted to the Photobook are popping up around the world.

With the 3rd annual Photography Book Now and featuring a contest deadline fast approaching (sponsored by Blurb with a whopping $25,000 grand prize), a few of us that love photobooks thought we would initiate another online discussion about self-publishing—where we've come in the last few years in terms of perception, creativity and technology." –Darius Himes, Santa Fe, June 20, 2010

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When I posted my 2 cents on the "Future of Photography Books" back in December, I was just considering using Blurb.com for the first time for a photobook project. Half a year and several Blurb books later...I am a total convert! I think it's the greatest invention since the internet! It's opened up a world of possibilities for everyone, where it had been open to only a few. Your self-published book can be as great as you (or your book designer!) are able to create.

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"What do we mean by "self-publishing"?
ADD your thoughts to THE round-table discussion"
—Andy Adams, Flak Photo

FRACTION MAGAZINE: Issue 16

Drop-off and Border Fence, Sonora
Photograph (c) David Taylor /All Rights Reserved

Border Monument No.210 - N 32° 42.352' W 114° 54.596'
Photograph (c) David Taylor /All Rights Reserved

"For the last four years I have been photographing along the U.S.-Mexico border between El Paso/Juarez and Tijuana/San Diego. The project is organized around an effort to document all of the monuments that mark the international boundary west of the Rio Grande. The rigorous effort to reach all of the approximately 276 obelisks, which were installed between 1891 and 1895, has inevitably led to encounters with migrants, smugglers, Border Patrol agents, minutemen and local residents of the borderlands."—David Taylor, Working The Line (Radius Books)

Old Lady and Granddaughter, Maramures, Romania
Photograph (c) David Leventi /All Rights Reserved

Market, Maramures, Romania
Photograph (c) David Leventi /All Rights Reserved

"Romania Revisited retraces my great-grandfather’s footsteps into an unexpected past. Based on stories told by my father and grandmother, I traveled to Romania with a 4x5” large format view camera, collecting lost memories on a journey through a country now struggling to put behind it a lifespan of tyranny, while all the best and brightest who dared or were able to left."—David Leventi, Romania Revisited

Imperfect Apple, Summer, Aomori Prefecture
Photograph (c) Jane Alden Stevens /All Rights Reserved

Culled Apples & Branches, Early Summer, Aomori Prefecture
Photograph (c) Jane Alden Stevens /All Rights Reserved

Growing apples in the traditional way is a laborious, hands-on process in Japan. At the moment of harvest, an apple raised in this manner has been touched by the farmer's hands at least ten times since its blossom was set.—Jane Alden Stevens, Traditional Apple Growing in Japan

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FRACTION MAGAZINE: ISSUE 16

Photographs by David Leventi, David Taylor, Isabelle Pateer,
Jane Alden Stevens, Susan Lynn Smith, and Taylor Glenn

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FRACTION BLOG

Join the Discussion: Publishing in Your Hands

With Darius Himes, Melanie McWhorter, Andy Adams and David Bram. "What do we mean by "self-publishing"? Add your thoughts to our round-table discussion" —Andy Adams, Flak Photo