Filed in: gordon parks lens blog new york times
via NYT Lens Blog - Gordon Parks’s Harlem Family Revisited
In March 1968, Gordon Parks published a portrait of an African-American child with disheveled clothes in Life magazine. His lips were swollen and cracked from eating plaster, in a futile attempt to ward off hunger. His eyes were plaintive and haunting.
via NYT Lens - Alex Webb: Rendering a Complex World, in Color and Black-and-White
Filed in: mark cohen lens blog Wilkes-Barre
via The NYT Lens Blog - Bright Flash, Small City
(Mark Cohen) He has lived in the down-on-its-luck small city in northeast Pennsylvania for 69 years — his entire life.
“If I came to New York City and started horsing around and getting in long aesthetic discussions with professors of art, or hanging out with artists at the Cedar Bar? It would have been incredibly distracting.”
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via NYT Lens Blog - Losing Fear and Learning to See
Filed in: new york times lens blog northern nigeria nigeria violence benedicte kurzen
via NYT Lens Blog - Looking at the Tangled Roots of Violence in Northern Nigeria
photos by Benedicte Kurzen
Benedicte Kurzen, a French photographer who has been based in Johannesburg since 2005, came to Nigeria last year with a Pulitzer Center grant and a sense of the roiling tensions there: long-seeded resentments, rooted in the breathtaking disparity of wealth, widespread corruption and a pervasive, implacable fear.
Filed in: lens blog petrut calinescu black sea
via NYT Lens Blog - A Dip Into the Black Sea
As a boy growing up in Constanta, a Romanian city on the western coast of the Black Sea, Petrut Calinescu made the seaside his playground. He spent his afternoons with friends, searching for German bunkers and plotting adventures. He recalls being drawn to the mystique of the open water.
“Once you look at the sea, you always want to know what is across the sea,”
via NYT Lens Blog - Breaking Into Prison
Sean Kernan’s noirish photo essay on prison life was not the result of careful planning, research or even an interest in issues of incarceration.
It was a crime of opportunity.
Filed in: nytimes lens blog sean kernan prison
via NYT Lens Blog - A Lonely Gaze on The Times and Its City by Robert Frank
In 1958, the promotion department of The New York Times hired a young Swiss expat to take pictures that were collected in a slim hardcover book for prospective advertisers. The book, “New York Is,” extolled the virtues of the city and of the newspaper as the best way to tap its prosperous postwar consumers.
Filed in: nytimes lens blog robert frank new york nyc
via NYT Lens Blog - On the Beat: With a Gun and a Camera
Photo by Anthonio Bolfo
There are all sorts of reasons why people become New York City police officers. Tradition. Family ties. The pension. Antonio Bolfo’s reasoning was simple.
“I was bored,” he said.
It was 2006, and Mr. Bolfo – a born-and-bred New Yorker with a degree from the Rhode Island School of Design – was an animator working on PlayStation games like Guitar Hero and Amplitude. Still, he was unfulfilled. The attack on the World Trade Center had gotten him thinking about law enforcement.
“It’s not a cop drama where it’s just black and white,” he said. “Cops grow, and this is where they learn their skills and have a trial by fire. They’re put in the most dangerous neighborhoods in New York City. They have to learn superfast.”
By Michael Wilson
Filed in: nytimes lens blog anthony bolfo police nypd new york nyc
cohort Kristen Joy Watts for NYT Lens
via NYT Lens - More of the Same — but Different
The hill in question — in Lincoln Park in Chicago, overlooking Lake Michigan — is not very big, and didn’t occur naturally. It was born in the 1940s, when a pile of dirt was moved to make room for a tunnel.
When Mr. Octavious first saw the hill, not too far from where he lives in the city, he felt an immediate connection. “When I was little in class and I drew a hill,” he said, “I would draw that shape. That’s the hill in my head.”
Filed in: nytimes lens blog kristen joy watts paul octavious inspiration
Murder on the roof. Auguest 13th, 1941. ~~>
via NYT Lens - Weegee’s Killer Decade
On the lineup platform at the police headquarters. Circa 1936.
Steps away from the sanitized, commercialized and pacified Times Square is a portal to a sinister urban past, where two-bit hoods lay sprawled in pools of blood with stogies clenched in their lifeless jaws, watched over by the police and the curious alike. It’s a world of men with guns and hats who played their final hands under elevated tracks and tenements that have long since vanished.
Filed in: nytimes lens blog weegee inspiration
via NYT Lens - Washing Dishes, Herding Reindeer by Erika Larsen
“I wanted to live with this original hunter-gatherer, nomadic society in the modern world,” she said. “I didn’t want to just go and do a photo project; I really wanted to live with them. I wanted to learn what they do…
To really start to understand what my images had been teaching me, I needed to really learn the language.”
Filed in: inspiration lens blog nytimes erika larsen reindeer sami Scandinavia
via NYT Lens - Lost and Alone Under Tokyo’s Red Rain by HIROYUKI ITO
“Soon after shooting memorial concerts on the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, my sister called to tell me that our father had died unexpectedly. Two days later, I returned to Japan for the first time in 20 years to attend his funeral. I felt constant vertigo, like I had been violently cut and pasted from New York to Tokyo.”
Filed in: lens blog nytimes hiroyuki ito journalism inspiration
A meat stall at Mercado 20 de Noviembre (Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times)
via NYT Lens - 36 Hours in Oaxaca, Mexico
Filed in: lens blog oaxaca mexico inspiration
Kent State University, 1970. Original photo: John Filo
via NYT Lens - Iconic Scenes, Revisited and Reimagined
In the project “Fatescapes,” the visual artist Pavel Maria Smejkal goes a step further and forces us to reconsider the veracity of historical images and the photographer’s role by digitally removing the people that made these images resonant. What is left is the scene as it might have looked just minutes before or after the photographer passed by. These images are reminiscent of a time, before Photoshop, when photographs were believed to be a reflection of reality. Mr. Smejkal’s alterations question whether photographs should be viewed as accurate representation.
“I tend to think about historical processes as something really fatal,” he said, “Something much bigger than we are.”
Filed in: nytimes lens blog inspiration
