Favorite photo essays.

hmmm not really but those of your collection seems very interesting if not a bit unconventional

Not yet I don't, Boomer, but this inspires me to look for some photoessays.


Sebastiano Salgado comes to mind..

Great osso! Share anything cool that you come across.

Mary Ellen Mark is my favorite photographer partly because she so often works in essay form. I notice that now sever "best of MEM" type books are being published and that is kind of sad.

If you go to www.maryellenmark.com and click on the "Books" link you can page through many of her essays by clicking on each particular book.

Boomer, both photographers were intriguing. Ward 81 reminded me of a woman who had come to the US sometime in the forties, probably as an escapee of World War II. She was from a small Eastern European village.

She got lost and eventually was put in a home for the mentally retarded. I no longer remember how long she stayed there, but it was probably more than 20 years, only when the institution was closed and she was finally interviewed by someone smart enough that she wasn't simply babbling, but speaking in a foreign language.

It was hard to look and to read about Ward 81, but at the same time, I found the photos and the essay to be well written and down to earth, not the usual "Oh you poor thing" kind of pablum.

Have you started on one of your own?

Here's one link on Salgado -
http://csw.art.pl/new/2000/segalo_e.html


I saw a photoessay show at the Art Institute in Chicago when the a2k group was there in early May. In memory there were about eight photographers' works shown; I think there were several photos from Salgado's gold mine series. Haven't found a good link for showing them yet though.

I feel the same way about her work, Diane. She is unflinching as she documents the world. It is hard to look at but also somehow so beautiful.

I guess my photo essays are more personal. Of course I have documented Mo's growth but there are some other kids that I photograph on a regular basis. In a way those are photo essays.

I'm feeling inspired though, after looking through the three essays I posted and revisiting MEM's site. I might need to turn my lens on something a little bit differnt this summer.

Aha, here's the link for the show on The Concerned Photographer at the Chicago Art Institute. That summary reminded me, intense photography by Margaret Bourke-White in India...

http://www.artic.edu/aic/exhibitions/exhibition/concerned

Still trying to find a particular photo by Bourke-White, in her series on the partition of India.

In the meantime, I found a photoessay by Salgado on Displaced People of the World -

http://dir.yahoo.com/Arts/Visual_Arts/Photography/Photographers/Masters/
oops, that looks like the wrong link, back in minute.

Wow! I'll bet that was a great exhibit! I wish they showed more photos from it.

Thanks for the Salgado like. Very nice. I would love to know what the photo captions translate to.

Thanks again!

http://dir.yahoo.com/Arts/Visual_Arts/Photography/Photographers/Masters/Salgado__Sebastiao__b__1944_/

There, nabbed that one.

Well, not quite - once there, click on Outcasts: Displaced People of the World...

Found a little treasury of Bourke-White images here. Click on next, and then again and again, and you'll eventually run across some of the India photos and one of the Buchenwald photos. I still haven't seen the exact photo that was in that Art Institute show..

http://www.temple.edu/photo/photographers/margaret/mstart.htm

That's the best selection of her work I've seen in my google/yahoo looking.

Yes, Boomer, I was glad I checked that exhibit out - I hadn't been quite in the mood for concerned photography and almost didn't. Well, I got over that quickly enough!

have no idea where i would find it, but a few years ago i saw a photo essay, in a magazine, that detailed the lives of the mexican mennonites, colonies of mennonites that migrated to mexico, some live a strange kind of cowboy miami vice lifstyle supported by a trade in marijuana, and most live a little house on the prairie existence, very interesting and quite compelling

Thanks for the links, osso. Some of Salgado's photos looked familiar, so I looked around and found the book Disposable People, written by Kevin Bales. The cover photo is by Salgado. His ability to capture the futility of the lives of modern-day slaves and the backbreaking work they do, including children, is almost visceral.

Bourke-White was also somewhat familiar. I wonder how these photographers keep their sanity after spending so much time capturing the most wretched lives so intimately.

Djjd, I think Blatham was born into a Mennonite family in Western Canada. He didn't remain in the church, but has spoken of his family with real affection.

I meant to ask you if you could do something like that or if you would concetrate more on children?

Yes! Very much thank you for the links, osso!

I am totally beating myself up for not saving the link to a very interesting site about Canadian Menonites. They are completely different from what I assumed Menonites to be. I'm going to search out the essay djjd mentions.

I don't know how they do it. MEM's essay on the homeless and the prostitues of Calcutta or the street kids in Seattle. The Bang Bang Club's documentation of aparthied in South Africa (http://digitalfilmmaker.net/Bang/bang_frame.html) for which Kevin Carter would win a Pulitzer and become one of the most criticized photographers in history. He would later kill himself. Another lost their life while working. Another, another Pulitzer prize winner, would be seriously wounded and later forgotten. The last would document the killing and the wounding of those two and then he would be forgotten.

Frik if I know how any of them do it.

Me neither. It was, at times, agonizing to see the Sagado photos and the book, Disposable People was almost impossible to get through, sitting there in my comfortalbe chair while reading that mothers sell their daughters into prositution. Or about the factor workers locked inside the factories and treated so badly that most of them don't live very long--there are so many people that they actually have become disposable.

I don't know how they do it, but thankfully they do. Not enough people see their work or read their books, but at least there is a record. In their quiet way, they record history as it really happens, not how some committee decides to describe it or even cut it out of the books.

I'm starting to feel my bloodpressure go up--there is so much that is conveniently ignored. No matter what you decide, you will have captured life being lived. If it is with children just being children, it is terribly important and few have the real talent to do it. Kudos to you, boomer.

Ward 81 was really powerful with beautiful use of the natural light.

I loved the compositions of Maisel though.

I'm off to check on the other links

ditto - powerful work

Barbara Hind

here's a link to work by a friend of mine - worth googling for her other stuff too