The Family of Man

The Family of Man was a photography exhibit curated by Edward Steichen first shown in 1955 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
According to Steichen, the exhibition represented the 'culmination of his career'. The 503 photos were selected from almost 2 million pictures taken by 273 photographers, famous and unknown, in 68 countries, and offer a striking snapshot of the human experience which lingers on birth, love, and joy, but also touches war, privation, illness and death. His intention was to prove visually the universality of human experience and photography's role in its documentation.

The exhibition later travelled in several versions to 38 countries. More than 9 million people viewed the exhibit.

Edward Steichen

Edward Steichen, photographed by Fred Holland Day
Edward Steichen (March 27, 1879–March 25, 1973) was an American photographer, painter, and art gallery and museum curator, born in Bivange, Luxembourg.

Having established himself as a fine art painter in the beginning of the 20th century, Steichen assumed the pictorialist approach in photography and proved himself a master of it. In 1905, Steichen helped create the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession with Alfred Stieglitz. After World War I, during which he commanded the photographic division of the American Expeditionary Forces, he reverted to straight photography, gradually moving into fashion photography. Steichen's 1938 photo of actress Greta Garbo -- below, featured on the Life cover of 10 January 1955 -- is recognized as one of the definitive portraits of Garbo.
During World War II, he served as Director of the Naval Photographic Institute. His war documentary The Fighting Lady won the 1945 Academy Award for Best Documentary. After the war, Steichen served until 1962 as the Director of Photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art.
Among other accomplishments, Steichen is appreciated for creating The Family of Man in 1955, a vast exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art consisting of over 500 photos that depicted life, love and death in 68 countries.

The Iron Heel

The Iron Heel is a novel by American writer Jack London, first published in 1908.
It is a dystopian work about the rise of an oligarchic tyranny in the United States. It is perhaps the novel in which Jack London's socialist views are most explicitly on display. A forerunner of science fiction novels and stories of the 1960s and 1970s, the book stresses future changes in society and politics while paying much less attention to technological changes.

The People of the Abyss

The People of the Abyss (1903) is a book by Jack London about life in the East End of London in 1902. He wrote this first-hand account by living in the East End (including the Whitechapel District) for several months, sometimes staying in workhouses or sleeping on the streets. The conditions he experienced and wrote about were the same as those endured by an estimated 500,000 of the contemporary London poor. When London wrote his book, the word "the Abyss" was in wide use to refer to the lowest strata of society. H. G. Wells's 1902 book, Anticipations, uses this phrase in this sense throughout, and in several places uses the phrase "the People of the Abyss.". One writer, analyzing The Iron Heel, refers to the phrase "the People of the Abyss" as "H. G. Wells' phrase."
George Orwell was inspired by The People of the Abyss, which he read in his teens, and in the 1930s he began disguising himself as a derelict and made tramping expeditions into poor section of London himself, in emulation of Jack London. The influence of The People of the Abyss can be seen in Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier.

How the Other Half Lives

Jacob Riis is known for his dedication to using his photographic and journalistic talents to help the less fortunate in New York City, which was the subject of most of his prolific writings and photographic essays. He helped with the implementation of "model tenements" in New York with the help of humanitarian Lawrence Veiller. As one of the first photographers to use flash, he is considered a pioneer in photography. In 1877 he served as police reporter, this time for the New York Tribune. During these stints as a police reporter, Riis worked the most crime-ridden and impoverished slums of the city. Through his own experiences in the poor houses, and witnessing the conditions of the poor in the city slums, he decided to make a difference for those who had no voice. He was one of the first Americans to use flash powder, allowing his documentation of New York City slums to penetrate the dark of night, and helping him capture the hardships faced by the poor and criminal along his police beats, especially on the notorious Mulberry Street. In February 1888, the New York Sun published his essay, "Flashes from the Slums: Pictures Taken in Dark Places by the Lightning Process," and in December 1889, Scribner's Magazine published Riis's photographic essay on city life, both of which Riis later expanded to create his 1890 magnum opus How the Other Half Lives. This work was directly responsible for convincing then-Commissioner of Police Theodore Roosevelt to close the police-run poor houses in which Riis suffered during his first months as an American. After reading it, Roosevelt was so deeply moved by Riis's sense of justice that he met Riis and befriended him for life, calling him "the best American I ever knew." Roosevelt himself coined the term "muckraking journalism", of which Riis is a recognized example, in 1906. How The Other Half Lives, as the preface to the Dover edition states, "quickly became a landmark in the annals of social reform." Riis documents the filth, disease, exploitation, and overcrowding that characterized the experience of more than one million immigrants. He helped push tenement reform to the front of New York's political agenda, and prompted then-Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt to close down the police-run poor houses. Roosevelt later called Riis "the most useful citizen of New York".
Riis argued for better housing, adequate lighting and sanitation, and the construction of city parks and playgrounds. He portrayed middle-class and upper-class citizens as benefactors and encouraged them to take an active role in defining and shaping their communities. As a result, awareness of the situation of the poor caused those with the ability to help to be roused from their lethargy.
Riis's idea inspired Jack London to write a similar exposé on London's East End, most notably Whitechapel, called People of the Abyss.

...........................................Girl and a baby on a doorstep

..................................................Minding the baby-scene in Gotham Court

................................................Minding the baby-scene in Gotham Court

....................................................The man slept in this cellar for four years, about 1890

Bottle Alley, Mulberry Bend

......................

Werner Bischof

Werner Bischof (April 26, 1916 – May 16, 1954) was a Swiss photographer and photojournalist. In 1951, he went to India, working for Life magazine, and then to Japan and Korea. For the magazine Paris Match he worked as a war reporter in Vietnam. In 1954, he travelled through Mexico and Panama, before flying to Peru, where he embarked on a trip through the Andes to the Amazonas on May 14. On May 16, his car fell off a cliff on a mountain road in the Andes, and all three passengers were killed.

August 1951 - Okinawa Bischof covers the American Air Base on Okinawa for the international press as an assignment.

16 May 1954 - Peru Werner Bischof dies shortly after his 38th birthday in a car accident in Peña de Aguila in the Andes.

1950 - Great Britain, Italy Works in Great Britain and Italy for international magazines. Birth of son Marco in Zürich.

Don McCullin

Donald McCullin, FRPS CBE (b. October 9, 1935, London, England), is an internationally-regarded British photojournalist, particularly recognised for his war photography and images of urban strife. His photojournalism career, which began in 1959, has specialised in examining the underside of society, and his photographs have depicted the unemployed, downtrodden and the impoverished. Don McCullin is one of the greatest photographers of conflict in our time. His career has covered much of the latter part of the twentieth century - a relentlessly photographed century steeped in conflict.His photographs reveal a ravaged northern England, wars in Cyprus, Biafra, Vietnam, Cambodia and Beirut, riots in Derry, and famine and disease in Bangladesh. All are photographed with unswerving compassion. As resonant as some of Goya's most terrifying imagery, collectively McCullin's photographs constitute one of the great documents of human conflict and its attendant grief, expressed with a visual lyricism that allows us to glimpse the unbearable.

.....................................Londonderry, 1970

Don McCullin is recognised as one of the greatest war photographers, and throughout the 1960's and 1970's he covered events of global importance for the Sunday Times Magazine including the Vietnam war. His first published story in 1958 concerned his own street gang in North London, and his subsequent images in Britain have looked at the unemployed and the destitute. Abroad, McCullin has covered ecological disasters and the war-torn regions of the world, documenting events normally hidden from view. His work proved so painful and memorable that in 1982 he was forbidden to cover the Falklands war by the British government of the time.

Marc Riboud

Marc Riboud (24 June 1923 - ) is a French photographer, best known for his extensive reports on the East: The Three Banners of China, Face of North Vietnam, Visions of China, and his most recent, In China. In 1957 he was one of the first European photographers to go to China, and In 1968, 1972 and 1976, Riboud made several reportages on North Vietnam and later traveled all over the world, but mostly in Asia, Africa, the U.S. and Japan.
Riboud's photographs have appeared in numerous magazines, including Life, Géo, National Geographic, Paris-Match, Stern. He twice won the Overseas Press Club Award, and has had major retrospective exhibitions at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the International Center of Photography, New York.
One of Riboud's best known images is Eiffel Tower Painter, taken in Paris in 1953. It depicts a man painting the famous structure. He is posed as if a dancer, perched between the metal armature of the tower, below which the city of Paris emerges out of the photographic haze.

Paris, 1953. Le peintre, surnommé Zazou, est à son aise, j'avais le verige et je fermais les yeux chaque fois qu'il se penchait pour tremper son pinceau...

Images commandées ou photos buissonnières, depuis 50 ans Marc Riboud sillonne la planète comme un reporter, un voyageur, un promeneur qui aime prendre son temps. Les amateurs connaissent son goût pour la surprise, sa sympathie pour les êtres. Rétif à la violence, ses photos révèlent le plaisir de l’œil."

Alger, Bouzaréah, 1962. Le 2 juillet 1962, la jeunesse algérienne envahit les rues dans la joie de l'indépendance.

Chine, 1957. Le standard n'existant pas encore, ce fonctionnaire possède autant de téléphones que d'interlocuteurs.

Algérie, la Mitidja, 1963. La grande majorité des algériens étaient analphabètes. Ici, pour que les ouvriers d'une entreprise puissent élire leurs représentants, ceux-ci arborent des numéros.

Felix Greene

Felix Greene (21 May 1909—June 15, 1985) was a British-American journalist who chronicled several Communist countries in the 1960s and 1970s.
He was one of the first Western reporters to visit North Vietnam when he traveled there for the San Francisco Chronicle in the 1960's.
Born in England, Greene first visited China for the BBC in 1957. He later produced documentary films, including One Man's China, Tibet, Cuba va!, and Inside North Viet Nam.
Greene was a cousin of the author Graham Greene. He lived in the San Francisco area for area for twenty years. He died in Mexico of cancer

Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange (May 25, 1895 – October 11, 1965) was an influential American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Lange's photographs humanized the tragic consequences of the Great Depression and profoundly influenced the development of documentary photography. With the onset of the Great Depression, Lange turned her camera lens from the studio to the street. Her studies of unemployed and homeless people captured the attention of local photographers and led to her employment with the federal Resettlement Administration (RA), later called the Farm Security Administration (FSA).

Migrant Mother

In 1960, Lange spoke about her experience taking the photograph:

I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.

In 1941, Lange was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for excellence in photography. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, she gave up the prestigious award to record the forced evacuation of Japanese-Americans (Nisei) to relocation camps in the American West, on assignment for the War Relocation Authority (WRA). She covered the rounding up of Japanese Americans, their evacuation into temporary assembly centers, and Manzanar, the first of the permanent internment camps. To many observers, her photograph of young Japanese-American girls pledging allegiance to the flag shortly before they were sent to internment camps is a haunting reminder of this policy of detaining people without charging them with any crime or affording them any appeal.

Mathew Brady

"My greatest aim has been toadvance the art (of photography)and to make it what I think I have,a great and truthful medium of history."
Mathew B. Brady

Mathew B. Brady (1822 - January 15, 1896), was one of the most celebrated 19th century American photographers, best known for his portraits of celebrities and the documentation of the American Civil War. He is credited with being the father of photojournalism. Brady's efforts to document the Civil War on a grand scale by bringing his photographic studio right onto the battlefields earned Brady his place in history. Despite the obvious dangers, financial risk, and discouragement of his friends he is later quoted as saying "I had to go. A spirit in my feet said 'Go,' and I went." His first popular photographs of the conflict were at the First Battle of Bull Run, in which he got so close to the action that he only just avoided being captured.

The thousands of photographs Mathew Brady took have become the most important visual documentation of the Civil War, and have helped historians better understand the era.

Abraham Lincoln taken by Brady on February 27, 1860 in New York City, the day of Lincoln's Cooper Union speech.

Peeping Tom

Peeping Tom is a 1960 psychological thriller film by the British film director Michael Powell. The title derives from 'peeping Tom', a slang expression for a voyeur. The film is an horrific tale of voyeurism, serial murder and child abuse. The story revolves around a young man who murders women while using a portable movie camera to record their dying expressions of terror. The film was written by the World War II cryptographer and polymath Leo Marks. The antagonist, Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm), meets a prostitute, covertly filming her with a camera hidden under his coat. Shown from the point-of-view of the camera viewfinder, tension builds as he follows the girl into her house, murders her and later watches the film in his den as the credits roll on the screen. Peeping Tom has been praised for its psychological complexity. On the surface, the film is about the Freudian relationship between the protagonist and his father and the protagonist and his victims. However, several critics argue that the film is as much about the voyeurism of the audience as they watch the protagonist's actions. For example, Roger Ebert, in his review of the film, states that "The movies make us into voyeurs. We sit in the dark, watching other people's lives. It is the bargain the cinema strikes with us, although most films are too well-behaved to mention it."

**Michael Latham Powell (30 September 1905 – 19 February 1990) was a British film director. In 1928, Powell worked at a diverse series of jobs for various filmmakers including as a stills photographer on Alfred Hitchcock's silent film Champagne (1928). He also signed on in a similar role on Hitchcock's first "talkie", Blackmail (1929). In his autobiography, Powell claims he suggested the ending in the British Museum which was that first of Hitchcock's "monumental" climaxes to his films. Powell and Hitchcock remained friends for the remainder of their life.

*Leopold Samuel Marks (September 24, 1920–January 15, 2001) was an English cryptographer and scriptwriter. Born the son of an antiquarian bookseller in London, he was first introduced to cryptography when his father showed him a copy of Edgar Allan Poe's story, "The Gold-Bug". From this early interest, he demonstrated his skill at codebreaking at an early age by deciphering his father's secret price codes.

BLOWUP

Blowup (as in screen credits, also rendered as Blow-Up) is an award-winning 1966 British-Italian art film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni and was that director's first English language film. It tells the story of a photographer's involvement with a murder case. The film was inspired by the short story "Las Babas del Diablo" by Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar, and by the work, habits, and mannerisms of Swinging London photographer David Bailey. The story concerns a photographer (Hemmings) who may or may not have inadvertently preserved evidence of a murder, which may or may not involve a woman (Redgrave) who visits the photographer in his studio. As is typical with Antonioni films, the story does not follow a conventional narrative structure.
As a professional photographer, the main character mixes with the rich and famous in the London of the sixties. One day he chances upon two lovers in a park and takes photos of them. The woman of the couple pursues him, eventually finding his apartment and desperately trying to get the film. This leads the photographer to investigate the film, making blowups (enlargements) of the photos.

**Michelangelo Antonioni, (September 29, 1912 – July 30, 2007) was an Italian modernist film director whose films are widely considered as some of the most influential in film aesthetics. The first, Blowup (1966), which was set in England, was a major success. Although it dealt with the challenging theme of the impossibility of objective standards and the ever-doubtable truth of memory, it was a successful and popular hit with audiences, no doubt helped by its sex scenes, which were explicit for the time.