Friday Round Up - 21 October, 2016

This week on Photojournalism Now: Friday Round Up the finalists in the Nikon-Walkley Awards for Excellence in Photojournalism, Melbourne's Strange Neighbour hosts its last exhibition and never before seen photographs from E.O. Hoppé on show in California.

Awards:
2016 Nikon-Walkley Awards for Excellence in Photojournalism

Photo of the Year: The Man on the operating table. Picture: Andrew Quilty

This year I was honoured to be a judge for the photojournalism awards. The Walkley Awards for Excellence in Journalism are Australia’s most prestigious journalism awards.

On 13th October the finalists for Nikon-Walkley Awards for Excellence in Photojournalism were announced along with the 2016 Nikon-Walkley Photo of the Year, which was won by Andrew Quilty for “The Man on The Operating Table” pictured above.

The image was shot by Quilty inside the Médecins Sans Frontières Kunduz Trauma Center in Afghanistan, following the October 3, 2015, attack by an American AC-130 gunship on the hospital in which 42 were killed, including MSF staff, patients and patient carers.

This arresting image was a clear standout for the judges.

Other winners announced so far are:

Nikon-Walkley Portrait Prize
Winner: Brian Cassey, News Corp Australia, “Beaten Refugee”

Nikon-Walkley Community/Regional Prize
Winner: Marc McCormack, The Cairns Post, “Body of Work”

This is one of the images in the winning body of work. 

The finalists’ photographs will be toured around the nation in a series of free public exhibitions and are currently on display at the State Library of New South Wales and the ABC in Brisbane.

Finalists are selected by eminent journalists and photographers and overall winners judged by the Walkley Advisory Board. The winners will be announced at a gala event in Brisbane on 2nd December.

You can see all the finalists here.

Farewell Exhibition:

Permanence - Strange Neighbour

The Grotesque

Melbourne's Strange Neighbour gallery is closing, which is another blow to the city's dwindling number of photography-dedicated galleries. The final show is currently on featuring work by the gallery's creator and curator, Linsey Gosper. 

If you have time, pop in to see PERMANENCE, a solo exhibition of hand printed silver gelatin photographs that were taken in Europe and explore the mythological symbolic sculptures and architecture that have protected European cities and remained for centuries.

Death Always Comes

Mortarium

Mutter

The Guardians

Until 12 November
Strange Neighbour
395 Gore Street
Fitzroy

Exhibition:
Pasadena, California

E.O. Hoppé's Amerika: The First Great American Road Trip

Rooftops and smoking chimneys, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 1926

Curatorial Assistance presents an amazing collection of photographs in the exhibition E.O. Hoppé's Amerika: The First Great American Road Trip, which showcases masterworks that have recently been uncovered from the E.O. Hoppé Estate Collection archive.

E.O. Hoppé was a German-born British Photo-Modernist who is considered one of the most important art and documentary photographers of the modern era along with Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen and Walker Evans. Renowned as a portrait photographer, Hoppé also worked in the genres of landscape and travel.

In the 1926 he set off across America documenting his extraordinary transcontinental journey. The result is a collection of images that capture the many faces of America: urban New York, Pittsburgh’s “steel city”, Detroit's burgeoning industrial factories, Florida’s palms, the pueblos of Arizona and New Mexico, Yosemite’s majesty and Hollywood’s allure, are just some of the subjects that caught Hoppé’s eye.

Tahiti Beach, Coral Gables, Florida 1926

Towards the Evolution of the Modern Motor”, Ford Factory, Detroit, Michigan 1926

Pack yards, Chicago 1926 

Gas Station, “The Girl Behind the Pump” 1926

Signal Hill, Los Angeles 1926

Museum services company Curatorial Assistance, which manages the E.O. Hoppé archive, spent over a decade of organizing, cataloguing, conservation and digitizing Hoppé’s works. Now the public has a chance to see some of his amazing photographs.

“Hoppé’s insightful portrait of the United States is a revelation of diversity that ruminates on the country’s past, present, and future,” says Graham Howe of Curatorial Assistance. “This visionary work was the first to survey America at a unique time in its history, anticipating the road trips of other photographers such as Edward Weston and Walker Evans in the late 1930s, and Robert Frank in the mid-1950s.” 

Garden of the Gods, Colorado Springs, Colorado 1926

Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, California 1926

The exhibition will feature a selection of vintage prints, modern prints from original negatives, and related ephemera, providing a rare glimpse into Hoppé’s archive.

Dick Matherck, rancher, Colorado 1926

Portrait of a man, Nassau 1926

21 October Until 31 December
Union Gallery at Curatorial Assistance
113 East Union Street,
Pasadena CA

Friday Round Up - 10th June, 2016

This week on Friday Round Up the focus is on women photographers: two photo essays, one depicting the survivors 70 years after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the other drawing focus on mental health in Bangladesh. Plus an exhibition of late nineteenth century photography at the Tate Britain, and some interesting weekend reading about the New York Times, Snapchat and working with NGOs.

Photo Essay:
Keiko Hiromi - 70 Years After...

This is a significant, and brilliantly executed, project by Japanese photographer Keiko Hiromi. She has interviewed survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb blasts and photographed them in the locations where they were on the day the horrific power of nuclear warfare became a reality. You can read the full interviews on her website here. Please take the time, these are important stories that should not be forgotten. Below are excerpts from some of the stories. 

"The next morning, Hiroshima had been burned to dirt. I saw skeletons, dead bodies of half burned, carbonized bodies, swelled bodies whose gender you could not tell. It was eerily quiet. I walked back to my home in Miyajima. This is when I found out that my younger sister had died.” Hiroshi Hosokawa (above).

"A beam of strong light came in from northern window, and I wondered what it was. Then the huge blast broke through the windows. We did not know what to do, we were panicking. Everyone was crying. I guess I was crying, too.”  Tamiko Shiroishi (above).

"On night of August 9th, we spent a night at the mountain. Nagasaki was burning. It was a cold night. I could not sleep. In the morning, I came down with my relatives to Nagasaki. This was when I first saw dead bodies. I was scared. But I also wanted to see it. I looked to the side. It was two men wearing a factory uniforms. They did not have any visible injuries. Nagasaki was covered with ashes, it was like snow. There was no road, we walked through ashes to air raid shelter. There were many skeletons in the ashes. There were a lot of dead bodies in the ruins. It smelled very strong. It must have been smell of bodies burning. Inside the air raid shelter, there were a lot of people. Many were badly injured and burned. The shelter was filled with crying and a horrible odor. They just lied there and dying, no one got treated." Sachiko Matsuo (above).

“On August 9, 1945, I heard a big bomb was dropped in Nagasaki. My entire family was in Nagasaki. I got ready, carried my youngest child (8 months old) on my back and held the hand of 3 years old Masahiro. I headed to Nagasaki within a few days. We took a boat to Mogi harbor, and walked approx. 10km to Nagasaki city. When I got to Nagasaki, I ran into one of my husband’s relatives. “Uragami is all gone” he said. I found a death toll. I did not see any of my family names. “Maybe they are alive” I had a hope. My hope was shuttered, when I found out that most of my family died of the blast instantly. There was no one to report the dead. There was nothing left in Uragami district. I did get to see one of my sisters who survived the blast. We stayed with her over night. Next morning, I said to her "take care and I will return soon." and I went back to Amakusa. When I came back to Nagasaki next time, she had died. I did not think she would die like that. I heard she lost all her hair before dying. She was 21 years old." Misao Hirano and her son Masahiro (above).

Photo Essay:
Allison Joyce - Mental Health in Bangladesh

I discovered this body of work in a recent article in Huck magazine on the Koan Collective a group of six young photojournalists. Allison Joyce is based in Mumbai and is tackling important topics: abortion, riots, rape, life, death and the environment. Here's a selection of images from her project on mental health in Bangladesh.










All images (C) Allison Joyce
Out of interest, a 'koan" is a paradoxical anecdote or riddle without a solution, used in Zen Buddhism to demonstrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning and provoke enlightenment. (Thanks to the Oxford Dictionary).


Exhibition: London
Painting with Light: Art and Photography from the Pre-Raphaelites to the Modern Age

1906: Photographer Minna Keene reinterprets Rossetti’s 'Prosperine' with this portrait of her daughter Violet, who also went on to be a photographer.

This exhibition features a number of photographs taken in the late 1800s and early twentieth century, illuminating the connections between early photography and Pre-Raphaelite and impressionist works. Amongst the photographs on show are works by six women photographers who were successful portrait artists and commercial photographers at that time. Check out the dramatic captions of Julia Margaret Cameron's works. Wonderful.

Isabella Grace by Clementina Hawarden (1861-62)

Julia Margaret Cameron "Call, I Follow, I Follow, Let Me Die!" 1867

Julia Margaret Cameron "So Like a Shatter'd Column Lay the King" 1875

Zaida Ben-Yusuf "The odor of pomegranates" 1899

On at the Tate Britain until 25 September

Interesting weekend reading:

Poynter: The New York Times of the Future is Beginning to Take Shape
Less stilted writing and more visual stories. "[Masthead editors] have been meeting with department heads and others to collect ideas about how to build a newsroom that produces fewer perfunctory articles and a greater array of story forms, including more visual journalism, and conversational writing."

TIME: Why Snapchat Could Change How Photographers Tell Stories
“Snapchat brings the reader into the story. Each viewer becomes a part of the assignment. They are my travel companions,” John Stanmeyer.

Lensculture: Working with NGOs
MYOP director Olivier Laban-Mattei talks to Kyla Woods about the benefits of working with an agency and the ethics behind working for NGOs.

Friday Round Up - 6 November, 2015

This week on Friday Round Up three exhibitions feature, one in Melbourne and two in Paris. Next week I'll be posting from Paris Photo. Plus a preview to Greg Constantine's new book Nowhere People.

Exhibition:
Melbourne

John Williams - Taking a Camera for a Walk
My First 60 Years on the Streets

John Williams describes himself as “an historian who makes pictures and a picture maker who writes history…History can never be absolute fact, any more than photography tells truths or simply describes facts. The best the individual photographer/historian can hope for is to accumulate and interpret aspects of time and place. In his or her turn, the viewer-cum-reader brings to the image-cum-text a raft of accumulated beliefs and prejudices that enable the possibility of a whole new set of readings and interpretations beyond those imagined by the author”.

During the mid-70’s Williams, who was married to Australian photographer Ingeborg Tyssen, was the co-founder of The Photographers Gallery in South Yarra. His earliest work was captured in square format on a Rolleicord TLR and forms part of this exhibition.

This is the first exhibition of William’s work in Melbourne since his retrospective at the NGV in 1991 and he says “Treat these as an old man’s cry of alarm and sigh of resignation. Enough to say that I’m not finished yet with either the streets or the anti-landscapes to which they led me”.

Until 28 November
Artist Talk: Saturday 7 November

CF Gallery
409-429 Gore St
Fitzroy

Paris:

Who’s Afraid of Women Photographers
Musée de L’Orangerie and Musée D’Orsay
Until 24 January

A brilliant collection from some of the earliest female photographers and photojournalists. 

Bishareen children Egypt 1914 Helen Messinger Murdoch

Self-portrait c1896 Frances Benjamin Johnston

 New York c1940 Helen Levitt

President Roosevelt, 1904 Jessie Tarbox Beals

Trude and I masked, short skirts, 1891 Alice Austen

Vivien and Merlin 1874 Julia Margaret Cameron

We are Three Women. We are Three Million Women 1938 Barbara Morgan 

Young Suffragettes 1909 Christina Broom

Magnum Photos and UNEP Exhibition 

Above: (C) Paolo Pellegrin, eco-district France

In the lead to the COP21 climate summit in Paris this exhibition portrays the problems and some of the solutions for climate change. Commissioned by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) this group show features the work of ten Magnum photographers - Jonas Bendiksen, Michael Christopher Brown, Bieke Depoorter, Thomas Dworzak, Chien Chi Chang, Stuart Franklin, Sohrab Hura, Moises Saman, Paolo Pellegrin and Jerome Sessin.

(C) Bieke Depoorter Trinidad and Tobago 

(C) Ethiopia Jerome Sessin


(C) Sohrab Hura Philippines 


(C) Jonas Bendiksen Kenya


(C) Michael Christopher Brown Brazil


(C) Moises Saman, Chile


(C) Stuart Franklin, Peru


(C) Thomas Dworzak, Liberia

Until 4 January, 2016
Musée de l'Homme
17 Place du Trocadéro et du 11 Novembre
Paris, 75116 

Book Preview:
Greg Constantine - Nowhere People 

Over the past decade Canadian-American photographer Greg Constantine has travelled to 18 countries documenting some of the 12 million people who live without citizenship. These stateless people live on the fringes, unable to officially work, receive aid or health care or education.

Constantine says his interest in statelessness was sparked when he was living in Tokyo in 2005. “One of the first stories I worked on as a photographer was North Korean refugees. Most of the North Korean refugees I met in South-east Asia were women giving birth to children in China. The children were not North Korean citizens, they were not considered Chinese citizens, and until they actually set foot on South Korean soil, they would not be considered citizens of South Korea either, so really these kids were stateless”.

Since then Constantine has worked with NGOs, and received grants from the likes of the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, Open Society and others to help fund this massive undertaking. This work forms the basis to his new book Nowhere People which was released this week and is available from nowherepeople.org and Amazon.com. 

“The intention of the...books is not so much to chronicle my work. They're really designed to let these people tell their stories and let my photos weave in and out of their testimonies,” he concludes.

(C) All images Greg Constantine.