u/Vast_Mark_8290

Levitt photographed in New York’s poorer neighborhoods before and during World War II. These images, which won early admirers, including Walker Evans, were in black and white. In 1959, after Levitt won a Guggenheim Fellowship, she turned to color film.

She took this photograph in 1988, the year she turned 75. It shows two children squeezing their bodies into a phone booth dominated by a heavyset woman. You assume she’s their mother.

It’s a wonderful, pomposity-puncturing picture that looks caught on the fly, but it’s also beautifully composed. The image is alive to unexpected color rhymes (yellow and dull green) and has an intriguing sense of space (compare the deep perspective to the left of the booth with the flat space that becomes obstructed on the right). 

In photograph after photograph, Levitt showed that children’s physical gaucheness can be authentically expressive. In fact, the shapes their bodies make are to the decorous postures of adults as children’s halting speech is to adult fluency. They remind you, in any case, that there’s more to self-expression than having a smooth tongue. 

Levitt’s photograph is a gorgeous, playful image of a family’s easy intimacy. But it’s also a claustrophobic image. 

Her career overlapped with a period of heightened interest in child psychology. The pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott wrote about children’s play as a pathway to fullness of being. Problems can arise, he suggested, when their natural desires meet too much resistance, when they have no room to play, when their movements are constrained. 

Here, the mother figure is conducting adult business. Her posture expresses her mature self-possession. She’s earned the space allotted her; she’s going to occupy it. The kids, comparatively, have no sovereignty. They must draw on all their inventiveness, squirming and twisting themselves into ungainly yet marvelously expressive postures as they squeeze into the spaces left over. 

It won’t be long before they won’t fit at all

From the Great Book " American Geography "

Photo taken by the Associated Press’ Emilio Morenatti, people crowd under a bridge as they try to flee across the Irpin River on the outskirts of Kyiv on March 5.

The bridge had been destroyed on purpose to prevent Russian forces from moving on to the capital, CNN’s Clarissa Ward reported.

Ward said at the time that she was “seeing a lot of people who are clearly, visibly shaken, petrified because they have been trapped in terrible bombardment for days on end and are just now starting to get out.”

The sound of constant artillery could be heard in the background.

“ These people have been under bombardment for seven straight days and are only just leaving their homes,” Ward said. “And they're leaving them reluctantly, and they're leaving them with the knowledge that they might not be able to go back to them ”

https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2022/05/world/ukraine-war-photographers-cnnphotos/

Tired Little Boy Crying Outside Circus Madison Square Garden

World Press Photo of the Year ( 2019 ) : Crying Girl on the Border | Immigration policy of Donald Trump

Honduran toddler Yanela Sanchez cries as she and her mother, Sandra Sanchez, are taken into custody by US border officials in McAllen, Texas, USA, on 12 June.

Immigrant families had rafted across the Rio Grande from Mexico and were then detained by US authorities. Sandra Sanchez said that she and her daughter had been traveling for a month through Central America and Mexico before reaching the US to seek asylum.

The Trump Administration had announced a ‘zero tolerance’ policy at the border under which immigrants caught entering the US could be criminally prosecuted. As a result, many apprehended parents were separated from their children, often sent to different detention facilities.

After this picture was published worldwide, US Customs and Border Protection confirmed that Yanela and her mother had not been among the thousands who had been separated by US officials. Nevertheless, public outcry over the controversial practice resulted in President Donald Trump reversing the policy on 20 June

Self-Portrait of Pioneer Street Photographer Vivian Maier

From the Great Book " Living Room "

" Life is short. Break the rules. Forgive quickly. Kiss slowly. Love truly. Laugh uncontrollably and never regret anything that made you smile ! "

~ Robert Doisneau

Fires set by anti-election provocateurs

The Swiss photographer René Burri was born in 1933. At the age of 13, he photographed Winston Churchill in Zurich. He completed his training as a photographer at the Zurich School of Applied Arts.

In 1955, Burri received international attention for one of his first reportages, “Touch of Music for the Deaf,” on music pedagogue Mimi Scheiblauer’s classes for deaf-mute children, published in Life magazine. Burri became an associate of Magnum in 1955 and a full member in 1959.

While traveling throughout Europe, the Middle East, Southeast and East Asia, and Latin and North America, he covered historical events, such as Leonid Brezhnev’s visit to Cuba in 1974, the fiftieth anniversary of the Long March in China in 1985, and the fall of the Berlin Wall and events in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Among many other subjects, he portrayed Maria Callas, Alberto Giacometti, Yves Klein, Le Corbusier, and Ernesto “Che” Guevara. His portrait of the revolutionary with his cigar became known the world over.

Burri’s first book, Die Deutschen, was published by Fretz & Wasmuth in Zurich in 1962 and the following year by Robert Delpire in Paris with the title Les Allemands. Many international magazines also published his reportages. In 1965, Burri participated in the creation of Magnum Films and spent six months in China, where he made the film The Two Faces of China, produced by the BBC.

He was the recipient of numerous prizes and awards, including the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1991, the Dr Erich Salomon Prize from the German Photography Society in 1998, the Swiss Press Photo Life Achievement Award in 2011, and the Leica Hall of Fame Award in 2013.

He set up the Fondation René Burri in 2013, which preserves his complete works and is located at Photo Elysée in Lausanne, where in 2020 the retrospective Explosions of Sight was held. Burri died in Zurich, at age 81, on October 20, 2014

What's your favourite Martin Parr's photograph ?

Students in a chain passing cobble stones for the barricades, Gay Lussac Street, 5th arrondissement :

1968 saw a worldwide escalation of protests, which were predominantly characterized by the rise of left-wing politics, anti-war sentiment, civil rights urgency, youth counterculture within the Silent and baby boomer generations, and popular rebellions against military states and bureaucracies.

In the United States, the protests marked a turning point for the civil rights movement, which produced revolutionary movements like the Black Panther Party. In reaction to the Tet Offensive, protests also sparked a broad movement in opposition to the Vietnam War all over the United States as well as in London, Paris, Berlin and Rome. Mass movements grew in the United States but also elsewhere. In most Western European countries, the protest movement was dominated by students.

The most prominent manifestation was the May 1968 protests in France, in which students linked up with wildcat strikes of up to ten million workers, and for a few days, the movement seemed capable of overthrowing the government. In many other countries, struggles against dictatorships, political or sectarian tensions and authoritarian rule were also marked by protests in 1968, such as the beginning of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the Tlatelolco massacre in Mexico City, and the escalation of guerrilla warfare against the military dictatorship in Brazil

Guests by the pool at the Hotel du Cap Eden-Roc

Woman nursing a baby at a land reform meeting near Badajoz, Extremadura | Spanish Civil War  ( 1936 - 1939 )

From the Great Book " Subway Art "

From the Great Book " The Americans "

Thomas Hoepker was born in Munich, Germany, in 1936. He studied art, history and archaeology, but his real fascination was photography. His grandfather gave him an old plate camera for his fourteenth birthday, which inspired him to experiment with photography. In 1960, before he could finish his studies, he was hired by Münchner Illustrierte magazine. He went on to work at Kristall until 1963, then joined Stern magazine in 1964.

That same year, Hoepker was invited to join Magnum Photos, which then started to distribute his archive photographs. In 1989, he became a full member. He went on to become the president of Magnum between 2003 and 2006.

Hoepker and his former wife, Eva Windmöller, lived in East Berlin, where they worked as Stern’s first accredited correspondents. In 1976, they moved to New York, where Hoepker spent most of his time. As well as working as an art director for the American edition of Geo, between 1987 and 1989 Hoepker worked at Stern in Hamburg.

Over the course of many years, Hoepker has exhibited his work all over the world. Additionally, he has received various awards for his photographic and TV, film and documentary work. Dear Memories, his 2022 documentary released in cinemas, explores Hoepker’s life and work. In the same year, he published, The Way It Was.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Hoepker and Christine Kruchen, his third wife, began going back to his very first black-and-white film negative files and scanning what they found. One of their discoveries was a series of 10,000 negatives showing a photographic study of life in Italy in the late 1950s — his very first images as a photographer. Italia, a selection of these images was published in 2023 by Buchkunst Berlin.

Thomas Hoepker passed away on July 10, 2024, in Santiago, Chile. He was 88

“ Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst ”

~ Henri Cartier-Bresson

Mitch Epstein Portfolio :

https://www.mitchepstein.net

" For a photographer, the first 70 years are a bit difficult, but after that things get better "

~ Robert Doisneau