“I love the smell of urine in the morning, it reminds me of North Venice beach. The first place in America where a woman could wear a bathing suit in public, a man could go without a hat, where a person could pee in public without being arrested. The place where Kerouac, Burrows and John Wilber spoke while Charlie Parker played saxophone, where Morrison and Krieger pondered the doorway to the other side, where Charlie Chaplin built a ginger bread court for his mother, and W.C. Fields one for himself. Where you could get alcohol during prohibition, heroin during the fifties and sixties, crack in the eighties, and Meth in the new millennium. Where art meets crime. Where Arnold made pumping iron into Gold. Where you can see a man balance a stove on his chin while juggling chain saws. Break-dancing, roller-skating, and of course skate boarding. The slum by the sea, Dog Town.”
– Robin G. Brown
“Panos did not go to Venice Beach to take pictures. He was already there. There was no escape. Locked down. Stuck. California dreaming.
Click click.
Narcissistic, sarcastic, irreverent, hedonistic, decadent, satiric, ironic, paranoid, and flat out soulful, Panos is at the center of his own photographs. This is a good sign, for he lives inside his own work. Bring the boy another beer.
Death in Venice is a collection, a kaleidoscope, a myriad of mirrors, a massive mind spinning vortex. Get a grip on it. Or not. He doesn’t care.
Click click.”
– David Alan Harvey / Magnum Photos
“Death in Venice” by Panos Skoulidas published by BurnBooks on May, 2015 edition of 1000 copies dimensions: 28cm x 43.2cm, 68 pages
Homer, Nietzsche, Zorba, Hunter, Theodoros, Harvey, Frida…. where do I start? EASY, David Alan Harvey, my mentor, brother, family
BTW this book is dedicated to Scotty (vet) and all of the vampires and souls that create the Venice vortex.
To all Pirates, you know who you are! Thanks for the couches, floors, Bong hits, love, etc..
Each of you are a part of every picture. Carry it with you, as I will forever!
EXTRA LOVE:
Vissaria~ You are the future!!!! Maria~ Strong as a bird, Mom & Dad biggest hug, Kim my awesome wife, and Meredith, my super supportive mother in law… (thank u ALL for endless support……) LOLA~ Not last by any means. My Ghandi, my Buddha, my meditation, my companion. BURN MAGAZINE CREW~ Anton (THANK YOU FOR OUT OF THIS WORLD DESIGN), Diego YOU DA MAN, Haik……no words… RYAN! Oh Ryan what would I be without you? and FRANCESCA Gennari the killer associate producer…
This is the work of my 11 students this month in Rio de Janeiro. You are seeing 11 different stories or essays all shot in 4-5 days of real time. Each student comes up with their own idea or theme. These themes can be journalistic or abstract and subjective. The whole point is to get photographers started into seeing photographs woven together as essays. All of them are beginnings of thinking. Something that can be taken further later on.
Some are exercises in thinking and some are projects ready to be taken further. My job is to inspire, to coach, and to help mostly to have those I mentor to start thinking in a non linear way.
In this particular workshop we had a very unusual situation where I was also shooting my own essay, BeachGames. This added an additional spark as we were all putting pictures up on the classroom wall each day. Needless to say, we bonded in a very special way. We had some great times together all around..A time never to be forgotten.
We put this show together for a live audience in Rio in just a few hours from the time the last picture was taken. Enjoy.
As you will see in the video above, Kathy Ryan, New York Times Magazine, and I are long time friends. We met teaching together at the Eddie Adams Workshop way back at the beginning. Hmmm, maybe 25 years ago. I have no real sense of time. Anyway Kathy is a gem. Known forever as a picture editor, now turned photographer, now with a published book, and still Director of Photography at the NYTimes Magazine. Kathy became a photographer because of Instagram. Literally.
Instagram was Kathy’s only platform. Changed her life by allowing her to shoot daily in her own office environment and that’s WHY I am showing her here on Burn now. Not because she is a friend, but because she has done what I tell all those I mentor to do..Shoot in your own backyard. This is quite literally the best example I have seen. I mean the woman is shooting in office cubicles…The least likely place most people would shoot. Many wannabe photographers are in their cubicles dreaming of McCurry’s India and won’t shoot til they get there…Anyway check out Kathy’s new Aperture book Office Romance produced by Chris Boot, the producer of so many great books over the years both at Phaidon and now at Aperture.
Take a page from Kathy’s book. Look at what is right around you. Everything is interesting if you have the right eye.
Photo for BurnDiary by Diana Markosian, 2013 EPF Winner
This is week is number 52 for BurnDiary. Our anniversary. One year of weekly diary posts by 52 photographers from a multitude of countries within all five continents.. So many different approaches to daily life that after looking backwards is kind of impossible to imagine all in one place… But they are, here in BurnDiary; city life, love stories, landscapes and social issues and mainly many pictures about the record of a moment.
I write now not for the past but to announce that this diary will be turned into our third printed magazine, entitled Diary. Yes – life moments disappear while we are living them, but this is also about photography… these images, for the beauty, the pureness, the immediate feeling deserve the possibility to say something for longer. This is why BurnDiary will be a book.
The photographer this week is Diana Markosian, our 2013 EPF winner, announced when BurnDiary was at the very first steps. She continued her work all along 2014 showing very well how a grant can be important in a photographer ‘s life to have the freedom to develop a project otherwise hard to fund. The current year edition is almost to its deadline, so Diana’s week is just the perfect coincidence for this anniversary, the perfect candle for this birthday.
We want to say once again the 52 photographers who have joined us this past year are with us as part of Burn’s enlarged family and surely they have been able to create one of the best family diaries ever!
Many thanks to all who have created this most amazing collective one year essay. Our team at Burn Magazine looks forward to seeing what the next year will bring. In the meantime, please join us in our excitement for the soon-to-be release of Diary..
David Alan Harvey: So tell me how photography became a passion for you. At what age, and how did lightning strike you?
Constantine Manos: I grew up in Columbia, South Carolina, where I joined the school camera club at the age of thirteen. Photography became an instant passion for me, with an emphasis on the darkroom. I had a great teacher, who was a strict disciplinarian who taught me the fine art of how to develop film and make good prints. I fell in love with the darkroom, and this imparted a good sense of craftsmanship to all of my photography.
DAH: Do you make your own prints now?
CM: Yes, I make my own prints now. I worked in the darkroom most of my life and for the last four or five years I have been making what I consider to be beautiful digital prints, perhaps equivalent to darkroom prints – especially in black and white. Yes, I love making prints.
DAH: A lot of people get interested in photography at an early age, but what happened to make you think you could turn this into a profession, into a business, into a craft where you could earn a living? What made that happen?
CM: Well, almost immediately I realized I wanted to make a career out of it, and by the time I was fifteen I was doing picture stories that were being published in the Sunday magazine of the local newspaper, which was the largest newspaper in the state. At the age of seventeen I discovered Henri Cartier-Bresson in a magazine article, and I found my mentor and the kind of pictures I wanted to take. I found out what camera he used, what film he used. I bought them and went to a little Island off the coast of South Carolina, and I made my first serious set of pictures – of which I am still proud. That was it. Cartier-Bresson was my long distance mentor for years. As soon as I got together a box of prints from the Island project I got on a Greyhound bus, went to New York, went to Magnum Photos and showed my pictures to whomever I met. I received a friendly but noncommittal reception. Cornell Capa was there, he looked at my pictures and said “lets go have a drink”. We went to a bar (I had never been to a bar in my life) and he sat me on the stool and said “what will you have”? I said “I’ll have whatever you have” and he said “Scotch”. I’ve been a Scotch drinker ever since.
DAH: Well what was the island you photographed?
CM: It’s called Daufuskie Island; it was a little island that was inhabited by descendants of plantation slaves. It was very isolated. They were beautiful people, but that island is now a resort with golf courses and expensive houses. All of the original aspects of the island are gone, but I still have the pictures, and the negatives I processed are still beautiful after sixty years.
DAH: Yeah, that’s right. I forgot it was Daufuskie. I was on Daufuskie about twenty years ago and it was still pretty much like you photographed it. I photographed a one-room school house and that sort of thing, but yeah, I have heard that it is all resort now, so I can’t quite bear to go back there.
CM: And you know where the name comes from? All the little islands along the coast of South Carolina and Georgia are called keys, and Daufuskie was the first key in this string. In the Gullah dialect of the locals it was “Dau-fus-kie, the first key, and that is where the name comes from.
DAH: Well that is great. I think I used to know that fact, but thank you for the reminder. Now, you are a well known and very popular workshop teacher. At what point did mentoring other photographers become important to you and why did you do it?
CM: Well I have been doing workshops for about 30 years now and I did them because I reached a point where I felt I had things to say about photography in general, especially about the Magnum style, the Magnum spirit of photography in particular. In the process of teaching I learned a lot about my own photography because I had to articulate ideas that were useful for going out into the real world and approaching subjects very closely and being able to make pictures that went beyond just what things looked like, but were something special and perhaps unique.
DAH: Well the real world has changed obviously, as the real world does over time. Today, a young photographer has to look at the process of making it into the business much differently than when you or I did. Do you think what you have to say is still relevant to a young photographer today?
CM: I think what I have to say and what a lot of older photographers have to say is still relevant, especially the Magnum photographers who have embraced the Magnum spirit and the Magnum approach. I think it will be forever valid because the world is only changing superficially. We still have people, human beings, and it is really about the human condition which is the main subject of Magnum photographers. You can go back to the beginning and look at the work of Cartier-Bresson, who was a young poet, who began doing photojournalism, mostly at the urging of Robert Capa – a brave hardcore photo-journalist. George Rodger was the intrepid traveler going to exotic places like Africa, and David Seymour was kind of a mix of them all. Between these early founders you have in a way the beginning of the Magnum approach to photography – which is still very valid and will go on forever, as long as there is a world. The Magnum archive is not the biggest in the world, but I feel it is most interesting and creative.
DAH: You can never take away from that basic story telling and humanistic vision of the world and the way that the Magnum photographers do it. Certainly not the only way, but it does seem the way that has stood the test of time.
CM: When a young photographer asks me, “how do I get an assignment?” I reply that before you even seek assignment you have to produce a body of work that shows how you view the world and what you can do with your camera. In other words you have to have something very unique, a vision, a proof that you are capable of putting your own personal stamp on your pictures and can show us things we have never seen before and will never see again. I think every successful photograph is a surprise, often defined by a special moment. Think about the poet who writes poems for their own sake and then seeks a publisher. Photography has become so simple, particularly since the arrival of the digital camera. I often start my workshops by saying any fool can take a picture, why don’t you try playing the violin? It is still very difficult, even though much easier technically with digital cameras. Everyone is taking pictures. Everyone is out there with a cell phone or whatever. When we were coming up, you had to at least know how to use a hand held exposure meter, set the f/stop, set the shutter speeds, focus… you had to have some skill and sense of craft, and then in high school there was usually one guy who had the professional camera and everyone else was just taking pictures with box cameras and a roll of film. Today there is a glut and because of the glut there is in a way a lowering of standards because so many people consider themselves photographers who have never gone through the ordeal of learning the craft, but have just picked up a camera and started pushing the button. We are swamped in a sea of banality, even coming from some people who are professionals and make their living from photography
DAH: I think that is right. I look at it as a combination of a plus and a minus. In other words it is a plus that everybody is picking up the language of photography, that’s fantastic, but I think the reason workshops are so popular these days is because at some point people realize “well wait one minute, I can kind of speak the language, but I can’t really speak the language”, and so they start looking for the history of photography, they start looking at more sophisticated ways of doing it. So it is kind of a plus and a minus. I think it is probably more plus in the long run though.
CM: Yes, it is more plus.
DAH: Yeah, everybody is a photographer, and like we were talking about in the workshop in Texas, English is a language that everybody speaks but only a few people speak it really really well and I think that is maybe a good parallel. So that is a good segue into what we are doing now with Magnum in Provincetown. Can you explain that one a little bit? I think you have created a potential experience for people to pick up on some of the things you have just talked about. Can you explain the workshops in Provincetown and what it has to offer?
CM: Well, Magnum Days is going to be a photographic gathering in the small town of Provincetown, Massachusetts on Cape Cod. It is going to run from September 15th through the 21st. Bruno Barbey, Larry Towell, Olivia Arthur, and yea you will be doing workshops. Provincetown is a very artistic town, with sixty art galleries. Artists and art are revered here. Magnum is partnering with the Fine Arts Work Center, a wonderful institution which is supplying us with ten studios and twenty student apartments which we will be using for this workshop. Provincetown is a wonderful place to take pictures. You can walk right out of the Arts Center onto the main street which is always bustling with all kinds of people. It is a seaside town so there is the whole nautical thing, and then there are the beaches, but mainly there is a lot of humanity here and great opportunities for photography. So it offers a great locale for our kind of photography if you are out there looking for a wonderful poetic moment of something happening between people, among people, in an interesting environment. I make my students all work with a wide-angle lens so that they have to get close and fill the frame and have a lot of information in the picture, and I try to teach them how to do that physically with their body, how to go out, find a picture, think about it and think about exactly what they want from this situation and go for it, and be able to get close without ever being seen.
DAH: Well nobody articulates better than you that process, and describing the elements of a picture. I kind of feel like taking one of your workshops myself, but because I have taught with you a couple of times I have caught some of your critique and you are amazing at being able to describe the process of seeing.
CM: It will be five days of workshops. Bruno Barbey, Larry Towell, Olivia Arthur, Eli Reed, and yea you…and me!!, will be doing workshops. Every night there will be a slideshow by one of the workshop instructors in the evening, and then on the weekend (Saturday and Sunday) we will have a gala for visiting photographers, Bruce Davidson, Steve McCurry, Susan Meiselas and Peter Van Agtmael who is one of our fine younger members. They and the workshop instructors will be doing portfolio reviews for all who wish to partake of them, not only the registered workshop students. There will be an interesting symposium called “The State of Photography Today?” because we all know photography is going through a revolution right now. In the middle of all of this there is the Magnum tradition, which has gone on for almost 70 years. There will be continuous loop projections in one of the large studios titled The Magnum Legacy, a history in pictures of iconic images from each of the photographers from the beginning to today. There will also be a projection titled Magnum Film Clips showing clips of movies made by Magnum photographers.
DAH: Well we have a continuum. I think if we have gone on for 70 years through good times or bad times there has got to be something to it.
CM: That is right, absolutely. And so we are always looking for young photographers who believe in this Magnum tradition and would like to be a part of it. It doesn’t mean we are all taking pictures like Cartier-Bresson. We have some remarkable young people who are doing ground breaking work, like Jacob Aue Sobol…a young photographer who is doing very interesting black and white work which is totally new and fresh, but is still about people and the human condition.
DAH: Well, you can use HCB as an influence but it wouldn’t do any good just to copy. You are influenced by somebody and then you do your own thing.
CM: You are influenced by a lot of photographers! You are a combination of everything you have seen and liked and thought about and you should hopefully become a unique photographer, a unique individual. The greatest compliment a photographer can have is for people to recognize their style without knowing who took the picture, and it takes a lot of hard work and a lot of thinking and a lot of focusing to accomplish this.
DAH: Well, thank you. That is great.
CM: Thank you, David.
Constantine Manos was born in South Carolina of Greek immigrant parents. He attended the University of South Carolina, where he received a B. A. in English Literature. He is a member of Magnum Photos.
Manos’ photographs are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Bibliotheque National, Paris; George Eastman House in Rochester; the Museum of Fine Ars, Houston; and the Benaki Museum, Athens.
Manos is the author of five books: Portrait of A Symphony, A Greek Portfolio, Bostonians, American Color, and American Color 2. In 2003 he was awarded the Leica Medal of Excellence. Manos’ work may be seen at magnumphotos.com.
Ahhh, after a whirlwind spring and early summer, I am finally at home for a bit. Summertime is exactly that, and for sure we all need a break at times. In this summertime spirit, we are going to extend the deadline for the Emerging Photographer Fund grant of $10,000 to September 02, 2014. Our original deadline for the EPF/Magnum Foundation Grant was July 31, 2014.
This is an extension of 4 weeks – all of August. We are receiving a lot of requests to extend it for one or two days, one week… No point to do that, so let’s have a real extension. The grant winner official announcement will be on October 7, 2014 , directly on BURN.
IF you have already entered and wish to add more to your essay or change your entry with this new deadline, then you may do so easily. Simply send an email to: anton@burnmagazine.org.
The next two weeks I will be at home. Working with my Burn team of Diego Orlando, Kaya Berne, Anton Kusters, Panos/Kim Skoulidas and Haik Mesropian to make BurnMagazine and BurnBooks as good as we can make them. Burn is an extension of my general mentoring. We produce workshops and books, yet Burn remains an independent entity. It is just us. We are not owned nor managed by any company nor beholding to anyone. This audience supports Burn through voluntary funding. We pay back by publishing your work when appropriate and trying to give a good educational experience. The EPF is only one part of it.
One of the incredible spinoffs from Burn is that I have had the opportunity to meet so many people from this audience in person in various parts of the world. Matter of fact, wherever I travel, there you are!
In about three weeks I will go to Cologne, Germany where Markus Schaden’s Photobook Museum will open. One of the books featured in this spectacular showing of photo books will be BurnBooks (based on a true story) my book set in Rio. Many thanks for your support on this project from the beginning.
Then to our workshop in Venice, Italy in early September where my students will produce a small book printed by Antiga Press from their week of work .
Soon after that I go to Paraty Em Foco photo fest in Brazil where some of my Rio work will hang and I will have a chance to do a short workshop. And of course drink caipirinhas with my Brazilian amigos where my relationships run deep.
I will end my shooting year in Jeju Island , Korea with a one month intensive shoot on the lady shellfish divers of Korea, producing a b&w book on this soon to be extinct cultural phenomena.
So, if you are anywhere near any of these locations, come see me. I will take the time to meet you if at all possible. I always do.
Let us know please if you have any questions about the EPF, or submitting to Burn, or getting a week of BurnDiary or whatever. We will do our best to answer.
Please enjoy the rest of your summer. Take some time. Shoot some “lazy” pictures. Often the best. If you are around the Outer Banks, come sit on my porch and have a cold beer. Good ideas pop , and real things get done when the vibe is right. That is the whole point of BURN.
“Photography is a strange phenomenon. In spite of the use of that technical instrument, the camera, no two photographers, even if they were at the same place at the same time, come back with the same pictures. The personal vision is usually there from the beginning; result of a special chemistry of background and feelings, traditions and their rejection, of sensibility and voyeurism. You trust your eye and you cannot help but bare your soul. One’s vision finds of necessity the form suitable to express it.”
Where we are born leaves an indelible mark on our bodies. The space where we first take air into our lungs is where language meets our ears, light meets our eyes, and the sensation of skin begins. No matter what follows, the place stays with us.
For pioneering Magnum photojournalist Inge Morath (1923-2002), born in Graz, Austria, the place that captured her imagination and vision was the Danube region in Eastern Europe. For nearly forty years (1958-1995), she made trips along the full length of the river, from the Black Forest to the Black Sea, and photographed the people and landscape along the river through generations of social and political change. She made her first trip along the Danube in 1958, traveling to Germany, Yugoslavia, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. Politics made Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Soviet Union inaccessible to her until the 1990s, after the fall of the Iron Curtain. In 1995, she exhibited her “Donau” project and published a book, but she continued to return to the region; the last trip she took before she died was to the land of her birth.
This July, Inge Morath’s photos of her beloved Danube region will return home.
Nine photographers — all of whom have received the Inge Morath Award, an annual prize given by Magnum Photos members to a woman photographer under 30 — will convert an 18-wheeler into a mobile gallery of her work and drive it along the Danube River, exhibiting the work in the very communities that Morath photographed.
Along the way, the women will create new work, collaborate with local female photographers in the region, and amplify the voices of existing local artists by inviting selected photographers to travel with them. “While we’re trained to be perceptive and pick up things with culture and people and photograph critically, essentially, we’re just visitors,” says Claire Martin of the project’s express mission to “support the under-represented female voice in documentary photography.” “We want people with the real voice of the region to participate in the project.”
Indian Border Security Force soldiers conduct a cordon and search operation where they entered homes and searched the area for militants in a suburban area of Srinigar, the summer capital of Indian held Kashmir February 15. India and Pakistan have already fought three wars over Kashmir and were on the brink again as they amassed near a million troops along the Line of Control.
SRINAGAR, KASHMIR,INDIA, MARCH 20, 2004:A Kashmiri man sits inside a police van after he was arrested by Jammu and Kashmir police for protesting with the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) in Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian held Jammu and Kashmir state in India, March 20, 2004. At least a dozen people were wounded when police used batons to disperse hundreds of protestors. APDP says more than six thousand people have gone missing since the bloody revolt erupted in Kashmir.
“When I started here twelve years ago, the attention was on Inge and her history,” says John P. Jacob, director of the Inge Morath Foundation. “About halfway in, we changed the tone of the website to focus on her legacy. We asked, what can we do for those who feel her influence? It has been incredibly rewarding for us to see this project flow from that change in perspective.”
Danube Revisited’s numbers are impressive: nine photographers, three of their children, one documentary filmmaker, 24 cities and villages, 10 countries, 1,777 miles of river, and all in 35 days — especially when you consider that Morath completed her version of this journey across nearly 40 years.
“I’ve tried to put together group projects with friends before, but it’s never worked,” says Kathryn Cook, who won the Award in 2008. “This is different. There’s a lot of glue between those who have received the award.” Lurdes R. Basolí, 2010 winner, agrees. “I wouldn’t be doing this project without what we have in common — sharing this grant.” Despite the administrative challenges of organizing this project across four countries and over two years, Basolí’s faith in the project never flagged. “We built this ourselves. It was never an option to give up — we all had such deep commitment.”
A unique collaboration in a field known for its solitary work, these nine photographers will spend five weeks sharing ideas, informing each others’ work, pressing each other to grow and evolve, and supporting each other along the way.
“I’ve done collaborative projects like this with my students before, and it’s always been exciting to shoot similar situations, then look at our images together afterwards and see how our eyes are different. I’m excited to do this with these great photographers,” says Emily Schiffer, 2009 award winner. Schiffer and Cook will be traveling with their children, which was another important priority for the organizers. Their Kickstarter page drives the point home: “We are all between the ages of 31 and 41 and would love to prove that there doesn’t have to be an age or a period when women can’t create or take part in an adventure.”
Despite being the namesake for a high-profile award for female photographers, Morath herself was dismissive of the gender issue, emphasizing her photography as the important discussion. However, she and her Magnum colleague Eve Arnold were also proud of their prominence as women photographers, especially in a time when there were obvious gaps in the diversity of not only Magnum, but also the entire industry.
Claire Martin says, “We’re trying to correct the balance from the historical white male bias in documentary photography, and trying to bring it back a bit. Inge was a pioneer that way, and that’s why we’re so inspired by her. She was one of the first to put a woman’s print on work and have it publicly validated and recognized.”
Most of the award winners knew little about Morath when they applied. But through the last two years of planning Danube Revisited, Morath’s legacy has come alive for them in a new way. “As you talk with everyone who knew her, you realize that they created the award out of deep respect and love for her,” says Martin. “In creating this project, she’s become really influential to me. I think of her being the one of the first women, breaking the barriers of entrenched gender roles at the time. How challenging that must have been. How ballsy she must have been to be so defiant, such a powerhouse.”
Jessica Dimmock wonders about Morath’s own perception of her trajectory in the field. “Did she think her career would change things for women, or did she feel isolated by being a solo woman in a field driven by men? Based on the changes she was seeing in her lifetime, did she think the nine of us could exist? Would she have an idea that this many women would be drawn to this craft?”
Jennifer Gandin Le is a writer and photographer based in Austin, TX. When she’s not telling stories with words or images, she’s saving lives through her company Emotion Technology, which works with social web companies to prevent suicide and promote mental health online. When she was just 24, director Francis Ford Coppola commissioned her film adaptation of the best-selling novel The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank. Her non-fiction writing has been published in Wired Magazine, Time Out New York, BUST Magazine, and The Village Voice. Her short film, Small Changes, won the Grand Jury Prize in the 2009 Intelligent Use of Water film competition, and was screened at The Getty Center in Los Angeles. Gandin Le graduated with honors from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
The Inge Morath Award was established by the members of Magnum Photos in tribute to their colleague, who was associated with Magnum for more than fifty years. The annual Inge Morath Award is given to a woman photographer under thirty years of age, to assist in the completion of a long term documentary project. The winner and finalists are selected by the photographer members of Magnum Photos and a representative of the Morath Foundation at the Magnum annual meeting. The photographers participating in Danube Revisited are nine of the past Inge Morath Award winners, who have benefited and grown as a result of the award, and wish to honor the legacy of Inge Morath by retracing her Danube journey. Each photographer brings to the project both a unique personal vision and a common appreciation for the challenges facing women photographers today.
WE ARE: Olivia Arthur, Emily Schiffer, Claire Martin, Lurdes Basoli, Kathryn Cook, Mimi Chakarova, Jessica Dimmock, Claudia Guadarrama, and Ami Vitale.
“It’s about reacting to what you see, hopefully without preconception. You can find pictures anywhere. It’s simply a matter of noticing things and organizing them. You just have to care about what’s around you and have a concern with humanity and the human comedy. ” – Elliott Erwitt
Born in Paris in 1928 to Russian parents, Erwitt spent his childhood in Milan, then emigrated to the US, via France, with his family in 1939. As a teenager living in Hollywood, he developed an interest in photography and worked in a commercial darkroom before experimenting with photography at Los Angeles City College. In 1948 he moved to New York and exchanged janitorial work for film classes at the New School for Social Research.Erwitt traveled in France and Italy in 1949 with his trusty Rolleiflex camera. In 1951 he was drafted for military service and undertook various photographic duties while serving in a unit of the Army Signal Corps in Germany and France.While in New York, Erwitt met Edward Steichen, Robert Capa and Roy Stryker, the former head of the Farm Security Administration. Stryker initially hired Erwitt to work for the Standard Oil Company, where he was building up a photographic library for the company, and subsequently commissioned him to undertake a project documenting the city of Pittsburgh.In 1953 Erwitt joined Magnum Photos and worked as a freelance photographer for Collier’s, Look, Life, Holiday and other luminaries in that golden period for illustrated magazines. To this day he is for hire and continues to work for a variety of journalistic and commercial outfits.
In the late 1960s Erwitt served as Magnum’s president for three years. He then turned to film: in the 1970s he produced several noted documentaries and in the 1980s eighteen comedy films for Home Box Office. Erwitt became known for benevolent irony, and for a humanistic sensibility traditional to the spirit of Magnum.
It has been a long time since I have written here. I have been shooting and teaching and teaching and shooting like crazy. Oaxaca, Rio, and now Dubai. Like a madman. Yet all of it my passion , all of it fun, and all of it just what I DO. Yet of course I just run out of time. Can’t do it all. Want to. Just can’t.
The above picture from Dubai is my most recent, shot a few days ago just before I left Dubai. Not a likely place for me to shoot, or so I thought before I went there last year. Something bit. I came back again. There was a fascination for me in a new age city where the people of the land went from the poorest on the planet to the richest. Overnight. Allah Akbar. Hence the title of my upcoming magazine : Up from the Sands.
Those of you who know me know that I love books the most as the ultimate resting place for fine work. Books are where I want my work to be. Books are my nourishment from colleagues, those I admire, my students, and those who are unknown to me., I simply love fine work regardless of source. Sure I want you to be interested in BurnBooks. You have acquired all that we have offered so far. Thank you. Yet for sure I will promote any day the fine work of great publishers like Steidl , Aperture, Phaidon, Trolley, Taschen, etc etc. and anyone else who makes a great book.
I am a Magnum photographer and I will promote Magnum anytime. My company. I will also interview for Burn fine photographers from VII and from Noor and from any other agency where I see fine fork. Why would I promo the competition?
I will tell you why. There just are not that many good ones out there. I will assemble any time all the great producers of any kind. We need each other. To keep the level high. Buy a Taschen book today, buy a Phaidon book tomorrow and get a BurnBook while you are at it. Competing? Sure. Only keeps the level high.
I will be introducing in a couple of weeks Michael Loyd Young’s new book: Beer, Bait & Ammo. Our latest BurnBooks offering. A work of art, a work from the heart. Mike flipped his life around. A former student, Mike turned his camera on his own world, something I implore all of my students to do.
We will be announcing soonest our upcoming lineup of books , and zines. Some mine. Mostly others.
It was Kelly Lynn James who has always been fully credited by me for the name BURN. Thanks Kelly.
So as we did for the title Burn , I am throwing this one out there for you to help choose (no money in this for you)
I wrote above that the title for my upcoming zine on Dubai was gonna be Up from the Sands. Yet I have also thought simply: Sand …what you think?
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