I’m working on a two-part series of posts at the moment, with Part 1 due up tomorrow. In the meantime, I thought you’d appreciate this. It’s a promotional video for the New York Public Library Photography Collection:
Among the photographers discussed, you can find more information at these Web sites (besides Wikipedia, of course):
- Dorothea Lange: her work and life is documented in various places around the Web. You can get a good introduction from the site of the J. Paul Getty Museum’s “About Life” exhibit of 2002-2003. (The Goethe quote which the narrator mentions says, “Each traveler should know what he has to see, and what properly belongs to him, on a journey.”)
- The NYPL’s own Berenice Abbott site
- Stephen Dupont
And of course, if you’re interested in documentary photography, you could do much worse than visit the Library’s own online Digital Images Collection.
marta says
Thanks for the links. It is always good to have more to inspire. I’m not really in a focusing sort of mood right now so pictures are especially great.
John says
@marta – Know what you mean. Of course, I’m so easily distracted that you could set a book of photos before me at ANY time and I’d come to, hours later, with my head swimming.
It’s hard to say which I love more — posed photos or candid ones. With some pix, you can’t tell which sort they are. But what do you think? Portraits by master photographers are pretty amazing — able to tell stories just by virtue of the subject’s eyes, face, hands…
marta says
I can’t choose. I like both. What I don’t like is when I’m trying to get a candid shot of people and they INSIST on posing. At the very least they could learn to pretend to be candid.
John says
@marta – Amen!
Maybe not everybody’s ready to *coughcough* take up acting, but (nearly) everybody seems to have Hollywood on their minds when you point a camera at them. It’s real hard to take photos with anything like the innocence of old(ish) snapshots.
Video was the last bastion of putting people ill at ease. Then along came America’s Funniest Home Videos… and along came YouTube…