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low resolution photography by davin risk
familiar
We finished watching Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke yesterday. Yes, we really do know how to liven-up a New Year’s Eve… Lee’s “Requiem in Four Acts” is primarily a first-person account by those who experienced and continue to live with the results of Katrina and the New Orleans levee failures.
It’s a draining but very powerful and emotional film and Spike Lee shows restraint as a documentary director. There are heartbreaking and even horrific narratives and visuals but the on-going story of family, race, culture, and class is told wonderfully by a wide range of New Orleans natives and those who were drawn in or gave of themselves to this.
As someone so far removed from New Orleans, the culture is often mysterious but these accounts make a powerful human story wherever you happen to be. What remains very clear is that the documentary isn’t talking about a frozen history but a living story that continues to touch thousands of people today. There is a need to tell the story of the people of Louisiana and Mississippi that continues.
Some Louisiana residents like photographer William Greiner have taken it upon themselves to keep the day-to-day impact of Katrina in people’s minds. Greiner’s blog features his powerful photos, snippets of Katrina news, and his own reactions. Scott Jackson’s blog has images from his return to New Orleans (May-June 2006 archives) where he grew up and where his family’s home was lost. There is also an effort to rebuild the studio of New Orleans photographers Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick (both featured in When the Levees Broke). Here is a New York Times story on their work.
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Scott Jackson’s “I take things as I find them”… Hot damn. Great, great site discovered thanks to the equally awesome Raul Gutierrez.
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Two Photographers - Two Visions
November 18, 2006 to February 4, 2007
Two Photographers - Two Visions is a paired photo exhibit of work by Ansel Adams and Alfred Eisenstaedt which opened yesterday at the Art Gallery of Ontario. I was part of a group of bloggers and photographers who got an early look at the show this week and it’s an interesting, if not immediately obvious, comparison between two photographers working from quite divergent viewpoints.
Difference is at the heart of showing these photos together. Adams’ work in the show spans from his 1920’s Brownie shots, through some of his most iconic images, and lesser-known photos from 1960’s which break somewhat from what is considered his norm. The images shown from Eisenstaedt’s career are of pre-war Europe in the 30’s based from his magazine assignment work at that time.
The two shows seem to merely share connecting rooms at first glance but there are some ties even though both men produced vastly different work with very little comparison even in terms of subject matter. What does draw the two collections together is seeing a global perspective on the world especially at the point where the collections overlap in chronology. During the 1930’s Ansel Adams was championing a burgeoning need for humanity to care for the natural world and was chided for dealing so much with natural subjects while his country was in turmoil. Eisenstaedt’s images of Europe in the 1930’s are filled with humanity and pioneered photojournalism in a world gearing up for the horrors of World War II. Both men were dealing with humanity and where they personally fit within the greater forces of the world but in opposing scales.
It’s a great show to see even if you simply want to see many original prints. Never having seen Ansel Adam’s work as original prints, it was very interesting to see the scale at which some images were printed and at least one paring of duplicate prints showing alternate takes on tinting and selective dodging and burning. There is also a later print of Adam’s beautiful Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico an earlier printing of which just sold for over six hundred thousand dollars last month.
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© Davin Risk