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Tags: in photography black and white portrait hannah elisabeth | 5 notes
Native Americans: Portraits From a Century Ago
In the early 1900s, Seattle-based photographer Edward S. Curtis embarked on a project of epic scale, to travel the western United States and document the lives of Native Americans still untouched by Western society. Curtis secured funding from J.P. Morgan, and visited more than 80 tribes over the next 20 years, taking more than 40,000 photographs, 10,000 wax cylinder recordings, and huge volumes of notes and sketches. The end result was a 20-volume set of books illustrated with nearly 2,000 photographs, titled “The North American Indian.” In the hundred-plus years since the first volume was published, Curtis’s depictions have been both praised and criticized. The sheer documentary value of such a huge and thorough project has been celebrated, while critics of the photography have objected to a perpetuation of the myth of the “noble savage” in stage-managed portraits. Step back now, into the early 20th century, and let Edward Curtis show you just a few of the thousands of faces he viewed through his lens. [34 photos]
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106 year old Armenian Woman Guards Home - 1990 (UN Photo/Armineh Johannes)
(via collectivehistory)
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“Gods and Beasts” by Rémi Chapeaublanc
A solitary voyage through Europe and Asia, led Rémi Chapeaublanc to Mongolia. The discovery of this country, where Man has not yet desecrated Nature, fed his thinking to create the photographic series Gods & Beasts.
In these lands, men and animals depend on ancestral ties that are both sacred and necessary. It is an archaic and visceral relationship in which equivocal domination games are put into questioning. Which are the gods, and which are the beasts? Or rather to whom are they the Gods and for whom are they Beasts?
Gods & Beasts consists of raw portraits. While there is an ambiguous hierarchy between men and animals, this series—created outside of a studio, in the original environment—overcomes this cultural order. This work of bringing into the light these relationships—in an almost ceremonial manner—places these Gods and Beasts for once on equal footing. The viewer is thus left the sole judge of the boundary between animal and divine.
Tags: in photography black portrait animals gods beasts mongolia | 11 notes
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World Press Photo of the Year (1994): A Hutu man at a Red Cross hospital, his face mutilated by the Hutu ‘Interahamwe’ militia, who suspected him of sympathizing with the Tutsi rebels. The animosity between the Hutu and Tutsi population groups in Rwanda had been simmering for decades. In April, the death of Hutu president Habyarimana in a plane crash near the capital of Kigali sparked murderous attacks on the Tutsi minority and Hutu moderates. The situation deteriorated further when the mainly Tutsi rebels of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) started pushing south from their stronghold in northern Rwanda. A mass exodus of people trying to escape excessive violence was underway by July. (
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Temma on Earth, Tim Lowly © 1999, 8’ x 12’, acrylic gesso with pigment on panel, Frye Art Museum, Seattle
“Temma on Earth is a poetic expression of internal travels viewed through external landscapes. It is a mural-sized painting that reveals Lowly’s ability to elicit emotional tension out of the subtlest visual contradictions. In doing so, he transforms personal family experiences into universal, human metaphors. Reacting against convention, Lowly doesn’t pose his daughter in a traditional landscape composition of a person standing against the horizon. Rather, he graphically depicts Temma as seen from the aerial perspective of a satellite image. Lit by an even, overcast light, she calmly rests on her side in an unkempt plot of land. She is surrounded by an expanse of dried earth and foliage, drained of vivid color. Her peaceful expression seems at odds with the harshness of her surroundings. Though the heavy folds of her sweatshirt emphasize her horizontal contact with the ground, something else begins to occur. Despite her palpable inertia, she seems to have brokenfree of the earth’s gravity. Traditional roles of land and sky have been reversed. The bleached, dried ground becomes luminously celestial as gravel is transformed into surrogate stars and tufts of isolated grass resemble mysterious galaxies. Physically one with the ground yet seeming to journey far away, weighted down while being lighter than air, Temma’s image speaks to her ability to transcend her real life disabilities.”
The rest of this essay can be found here.
Tags: in art painting tim lowly portrait frye art museum seattle disability handicap temma on earth | 3 notes
