Hillary Younger’s ‘Midas Touch’, Tarkine Coast, Tasmania
One threatened wilderness. One hundred artists taking action to save it.
Category Archives: documentary photography
The story of the girl in Mary Ellen Mark’s iconic photo
Amanda and her Cousin Amy: Mary Ellen Mark photographed Amanda Marie Ellison, 9 (right), and Amy Minton Velasquez, 8, in Valdese, North Carolina, in 1990.
(Courtesy of Mary Ellen Mark Studio and Library)
A good photograph can speak volumes about its subjects, yet still leave you wanting to know more.
The acclaimed and prolific American photographer Mary Ellen Mark, who died May 25 at the age of 75, was known for her humanist portraits: homeless children in Seattle, prostitutes in India, a family living out of its car. In 1990, she took one of her most memorable shots, titled Amanda and her cousin Amy.
“This photograph raises a lot of questions and leaves me with a slightly uneasy feeling,” says Jeff Jacobson, a New York photographer and a friend of Mark’s. “That, I feel, over and over again is the hallmark of her best work.”
This photograph is my proof
Duane Michals (1974)
This photograph is my proof. There was that afternoon, when things were still good between us, and she embraced me, and we were so happy. It did happen. She did love me. Look for yourself.
Journal your life story with images using this fab iOS app
Days is a journal disguised as an iOS app to document your life as it happens – in photographs.
Shoot photos throughout the day, and publish your post of images the following day in a visually delightful grid of time-stamped pics.
How is this different from Instagram? So many ways. Cool ways, too.
Amazing flash street photography
Chicago-based photographer Satoki Nagata has produced a series of abstract, black and white street portraits of people caught in the winter elements.
Nagata says that he lights his subjects from behind with a flash using a slow shutter speed and doesn’t rely on double exposures or glass reflections as it may appear.
The results are some pretty striking photographs of people who look nearly transparent yet appear to be almost perfectly surrounded by a crisp halo of light.
Here are more examples of Satoki’s amazing flash street photography:
Baby, it’s cold outside: evocative documentary photography at -35°C
The Nenets — who live at daily temperatures of -35°C (-31°F) in northern Siberia, wash just once a year and eat raw reindeer liver to survive — are documented in beautiful black and white monochrome photographs made by photographer Sebastião Salgado, possibly the best-loved photojournalist in the world.
Reviewer Laura Cummings says of his subjects:
These people endure the coldest temperatures imaginable. They stand like statues, apparently frozen still, positioned against the snowbound winds that drive the snow across the picture in silvery blizzards. They stand, and they withstand.
(And mainland Australians think my island home of Tasmania is cold!)
More images from this remarkable series follow…
A secret about a secret
‘A picture is a secret about a secret; the more it tells you, the less you know.’
Diane Arbus (1923-1971)
susie loves photography 