News
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Gail Quagliata
“If your photos aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.”
...or so said Mr. Robert Capa, born Endre Friedmann, died stepping on a landmine in 1954 clutching a Contax and a Nikon S in pursuit of that very closeness. After lamenting the fact that, due to statistics frowning at me (plus my lack of buying a lottery ticket ever), I haven't hit the Powerball jackpot
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Gail Quagliata
DOCUMERICA, and why we should do this constantly, part 2.
Documerica was a project launched by the EPA in the early 1970s to call attention to the pollution problems plaguing the U.S. in the same way the FSA photographers had so famously revealed the plight of the rural poor during the Depression. But why don't we (not the royal "We," of course, but people like me, let's say), as products of an American public education or even simply as photographers born into the Reagan era, know the furrowed brow of John H. White's "Black Youngster Taking Out the Trash On Chicago's South Side," like we know the furrowed brow of Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother"?
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Gail Quagliata
DOCUMERICA, and why don’t we do this anymore, part 1.
From 1971-1977, The Environmental Protection Agency employed nearly 100 freelance photographers to "photographically document subjects of environmental concern" around the United States. This ambitious (if ambiguous) project, which, to me seems so similar to the iconic photographic work undertaken by the "Information Department" of the Farm Security Administration from 1935-1944, yielded some amazing work that really should be seen more. The U.S. National Archives made much of the work available online, oddly, through its Flickr account. Here are some of the images taken by Michael Philip Manheim,
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Gail Quagliata
Sometimes a Can of “Beanz” is Not Just a Can of “Beanz”
Chris Killip is a genius. Proof:
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Gail Quagliata
Theoretical Family
Long winded Hallmark card later, one of the most impressive photographers I've ever encountered thus far in my life (full stop, not "in class" or "in Brooklyn" or "not in a gallery") just so happened to be one of my classmates, Seung Hun Lee.
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Gail Quagliata
Bacalaitos & Fireworks
Bacalaitos & Fireworks introduces readers to a New York City long gone. This is the New York of broken televisions littered throughout the streets, burned-out abandoned buildings, neighborhood fiestas with pigs roasting on spits, and outcasts living in poverty. Gottfried offers first-hand testimony to the pain of alienation, neglect, drug addiction, and ultimately crime, prison,
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Gail Quagliata
LUST
Granted, Arlene shoots a good deal of her work on 35mm (R.I.P., Kodachrome) and would probably look at me crooked for placing digital capture (regardless of its 37.5 megapizels or 30X45mm sensor) on the same stage, even in the same arena, as film, and, while my brain, eyeballs, and old-school vocational photographic education all concur emphatically, my heart and my, I don't know, ovaries? belong to this overpriced pixel-hog beast... Oh! Leica S2, you fancy vixen.
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Gail Quagliata
Leonid Brezhnev’s Unused Villa
Soviet Brutalist architecture is beautiful and strange, much of it like some odd abandoned spaceship, long-forgotten Hollywood Sci-Fi set from the 60s, or perhaps the fevered product of a very rigorously-minded architect on a great deal of hallucinogenic drugs. Frédéric Chaubin, when not editing Citizen K, has been taken with documenting odd buildings for some time, thus it seems natural he'd be drawn to these secular icons while traveling through the former Soviet Union.
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Gail Quagliata
She’s a Talker
it took almost a decade for me to be exposed to Neil Goldberg's full catalogue (or, more accurately, find out who the awesome "men with their cats" video guy was, and see what else he could do). Much of Goldberg's work is video based and largely silent, and it's the sort of work that describes a deep love for and understanding of the medium