 | Weegee (Arthur Fellig) was born in Austria (now Poland) in 1899, and he emigrated to America with his family. In 1923, he joined Acme Newspictures as a darkroom technician, occasionally filling in as a news photographer. Later he became a freelance press photographer, documenting crime scenes and daily life in New York City. |
 | Simen Johan, born 1973 in Norway, studied film and video in Sweden before coming to the United States and studying photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York. His images, which are arranged and manipulated digitally, show fabricated childhood scenes. |
 | Sebastiao Salgado, a world-renowned photojournalist, born 1944 in Brasil, covered the war in Angola and the Spanish Sahara for Magnum. After that he turned to more personal projects, spending seven years in Latin America to photographing the peasant culture. He went to the drought-stricken Sahel region of Africa to create the book and exhibition “Sahel: Man in Distress.” His later work includes a documentation about manual labor around the world and, most recently, “Migrations,” which shows the plight of displaced persons, refugees and migrants. |
 | Robert Frank, born in 1924 in Zurich, learned the basics of photography in Switzerland. He later emigrated to the United States, where he started to work for the magazine Harper's Bazaar in New York City. He created his most famous photographs after he abandoned fashion photography and traveled the United States for two years, documenting life along the roads that he explored. |
 | Clay Patrick McBride is a former SVA student. It was at school that he developed his unique style: scratching, coloring and cutting up negatives and assembling them to form new pictures. He creates commercial photo illustrations, but also works with people in the music business, creating portraits for music magazines. |
Salgado is a humanistic reporter, going out into the world and giving us his view of it. He is concerned about the state of mankind and shows us people in distress: immigrants, manual laborers, landless peasants, children. They all have been stripped of everything, but they still have their humanity. The images of suffering und hunger are respectful, and Salgado shows these people's dignity.
Johan is a pictorialist, creating fictitious scenes between reality and dream. He explores childhood and the psychological state of children. "By contradicting idealistic imagery of youth with realistic issues of life itself," Johan has said, "I hope to discover situations that reveal a sense of truth about the effects that culture and society have on the human condition. I want to create a conflict that confounds our inherited sense of what is right and what is wrong, and provoke in the viewer a dialogue with his or her conscience." Johan's work on a single image can last up to a month, as he manipulates and often re-photographs elements until the image is complete. He confuses the viewer through another clever use of technique: he records the finished digital image to negative film, then develops it in the traditional darkroom, playing with the viewer's expectation of a digital image should look like.
Weegee is another reporter, showing us a wide panorama of life in New York City: drunken, disorderly people, crime suspects and crime victims, but also children, families and humorous moments. During the night he monitored police and fire department radio dispatches so that he would be the first photographer on the scene. Those scenes ended up in the newspapers the next morning, ready for the world to see them. Hard-flash, close-up and spontaneous photographs were his trademarks.
Robert Frank is also reporter, offering his view of ordinary American life, unposed.
After he turned away from the commercial world of fashion and advertising, he started to explore his personal interests. His subjects are everyday items such as bus depots, lunch counters, cars, empty spaces and unknown faces. He tries to remain unseen, watching the behavior of people and taking a photograph at exactly the right moment.
On the other hand, Clay Patrick McBride is a pictorialist--he is posing his subjects into compositions, both in his photo illustrations and in his music photographs. Most of his commercial work, whether in the form of photo illustration or not, involves music: band portraits for rock and hip-hop magazines, and CD covers. Photographing for magazines enables him to reach a wide audience for his artwork, unlike exhibiting in galleries. He is a commercial artist, but he manages to apply his special style to both his commercial and personal work.
I have several connections to Robert Frank. First, he is from Switzerland, and so am I. Second, being a foreigner enabled him to be an even better observer of the American people than an American photographer. As I see in myself, being from a different culture gives one a different viewpoint. We can clearly see this alternate viewpoint in Frank's work. A further connection to him is the trip he made across America. I did the same in 2001, driving from San Francisco to New York in two months. This was a remarkable experience, and I took a lot of pictures during that time. But I also see differences between Frank's work and mine: he closely studied the people he encountered during his trip, while I mainly took landscape photographs. A typical example of his powers of observation is the photograph “Diner”: it depicts a waitress in a restaurant. But Frank catches her off guard--she is not forcing a smile as we would expect a waitress serving customers to do. The picture of a smiling Santa Claus above her brings a juxtaposition to the image. It also shows the forced happiness we
often associate with Christmas. One of Frank's most famous photographs, “Trolley, New Orleans,” from 1955, shows people sitting in a trolley bus, looking out the open windows. People, black and white, are each framed by their windows, which look like cages. White people sit in the front of the bus, while black people sit in the back. They all seem anxious or uncertain, maybe worried about where the journey is going. Here Frank is showing the despair and uncertainty that people faced during the Depression era in America and the racial problems still present in society.
His “Canal Street, New Orleans” is a frame divided into two halves. The top part is completely black; the lower part shows shapes and forms of people hurrying past the camera. “Elevator, Miami Beach” also divides the frame: The elevator door splits the world into two halves, the one in the elevator and the other one in the outside world. He divides the picture even further with his careful use of focus and shutter speed. The focus is on a young woman who seems to be cornered in the elevator--her eyes, turned upward, suggest her feelings of isolation and fear. The slow shutter speed blurs the people leaving the elevator, while the the stationary woman is sharply defined.
I admire McBride's photo illustrations. An illustration created from a photograph enhances the message of the photograph, or even creates a story in just one picture. For example, his “Favorite Poet” shows the face of an old man assembled from several pictures. The left side of his face is composed of photos that show him straight on, and the right side is made of pictures of him in profile. The viewer's final perception of the image is that it is still just a face, but McBride manages to show him from different directions at once, implying the complexity of every human being. “Jazz Is Violent,” another photo illustration, is composite as well--a gun's barrel turning into a trumpet. The subject or theme, “jazz is violent,” is turned into a strong picture that expresses this message by combining the two subjects, jazz (indicated by the trumpet) and violence (represented by the gun) together.
McBride's uses of the angle of vision and unusual perspectives enhance the visual representation of his subjects. One example is his portrait of the jazz singer Diana Reeves. The very low angle of vision enhances her stature as a diva, standing high and tall. He uses the edge distortion of wide-angle lenses to hold together some of the groups in his pictures. The wide angle allows him to capture more people, and the curved edges serve as brackets, defining the people as a group. McBride still uses compositioning, scratching and coloring techniques that he developed early on in his photo illustrations and personal work. For example, in the portrait “Rawkus Mos Def & Pharaoh Monoch,” the subject and the background are colored differently. The frame within a frame around the two subjects is scratched and colored red, yellow and orange, while the subjects are free of scratches and rendered in normal blue and white duotone. This puts the focus on the two subjects, while letting the blood-colored and scratched background serve as more than a background by implying danger or violence.
Sebastiao Salgado's pictures have a very strong emotional content. This is most prominent in his pictures from Africa. The people depicted are in distress: dying from hunger, living as refugees in camps. Salgado succeeds in showing their raw emotions: For instance a man fulfills his promise to bring his son to a refugee camp, but the boy has died during the trip. His face shows distress, but he is depicted standing tall, delicate as a tree. A woman's eyes are worn out by sand storms and infections, but Saldado shows her dignity and beauty. He works in black and white, and I like his strong sense of composition. For example, in the photograph of a man cleaning a rum distillery, the man is leaning out of one of the many holes in the distillery, waving his hand and smiling. The low vantage point makes the distillery tall. Another example is his portrait of fishermen raking the bottom of the sea for shellfish. Salgado divides the frame; the top half shows the foggy sky, while the lower part shows the fishermen in their boats, the top of the rakes raised into the sky. There is a fabulous mix between symmetry and motion in his picture of the Church Gate railway station in Bombay. From a high vantage point, the viewer is looking down to the station where two trains have arrived. An uncountable number of people, all dressed in white, streams from the trains while a slow shutter speed blurs their motion.
Simen Johan's pictures all have a certain strangeness to them. In “Untitled #99,” children dressed in paper costumes with the heads of rats emerge from an underground shelter in an ordinary front yard. In “Untitled #95,” a boy on a tricycle pulls a skateboard holding a stuffed baboon across an empty parking lot at night. Why are these children doing this? What is going on? I like Johan's use of known elements in an unknown environment, as it confuses but at the same time fascinates me. Those images are not real; children don't usually do such things. There is a parallel to fairy tales where children also find themselves in unusual situations. Johan's uses modern technology to create pictures that only exist in his head, but still have the feeling of real photographs.
My favorite Weegee photograph is “Fashionable People” from 1943: two very fashionable women, attending the opening night at the opera, are judged by another woman in street clothes, clutching her handbag. The expression in her face reveals that she is most likely engrossed with these fashionable people. In one of Weegee's circus pictures, we see a girl watching the action on the ring while at the same time feeding her escort a hot dog. His face is turned to the camera, away from her. Another one of these humorous juxtapositions can be seen in “The Joy of Living”: Under a movie marquee, a dead body is covered with newspapers and coats by the police, while the name of the movie playing is “The Joy of Living.” A photo of the body alone would not have been half as effective.
My favorite photographers range from three reporters-- Weegee, Robert Frank and Sebastiao Salgado-- to the two pictorialists Clay Patrick McBride and Simen Johan. There are share certain qualities: strong composition, careful observation of the world and an eye for the dark side of life. I try to incorporate all of these qualities into my own work.