Once an image is firmly embedded in the mind’s eye, it is difficult, if not impossible, to shake the belief that it is “true.” All too often we mistake sight for fact, believing that what we are being shown is what actually occurred. Yet so much of what we see is presented to use secondhand, filtered from sources we have not vetted to the fullest extent. We easily mistake fiction for fact when we are told that what we see is evidence of criminal activity.
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How many times has misinformation been presented as fact? It is impossible to know, for rare are the cases when sources admit to their error without a powerful public outcry demanding it be so. We are conditioned to believe these things do not actually occur, that neither the government nor the media would betray its citizenry for ulterior motives. And yet, with the Freedom of Information Act, we begin to learn just how frequent deceptions and counter operations regularly occur.
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During the early 1970s, graffiti made it way to the trains of New York, spreading across the city like a virus and capturing the imagination of a new generation of artists in every borough. Sneaking into the yards and walking through the tunnels in the dead of night, graffiti writers were on a mission like no one had seen before—or has seen since. Fame. Recognition. Renown. In the city that never sleeps, Kings were crowned.
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But as quick as it came, it disappeared. Were it not for the photographs, there would be nothing left. Fortunately writers and artists share that same compulsion to document and to collect. As fate would have it, Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant had both been documenting the same scene at the same time from distinctive vantage points.
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Over 150 years ago, during the Civil War, the great American abolitionist Frederick Douglass gave a speech titled “Pictures and Progress,” which spoke to the ways in which images shaped our understanding of life. Douglass was speaking at a time when photography had just arrived, creating a type of immediacy comparable to the revolution of the Digital Age. With the advent of photography, the ability to capture moments from life and reproduce them en masse imbued this brand new medium with a superpower: the ability to become agents of justice.
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Whereas art had been used as a tool of the upper class, photography leveled the playing field by becoming the first democratic art to find itself in the hands of the people. Anything and anyone could become a subject in its own right, including facts that had been hidden from plain sight. Images have the ability to convey meaning and understanding in ways that words never could, for “seeing is believing,” as the old saying goes. As it turns out, this applies to both first and secondhand experiences. Images have the ability to bear witness and speak truth to power, to right the wrongs of injustice and become a vehicle for change.
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Stephen Dupont is a warrior. Ready for battle, on the field, armed with a camera and nerves of steel. For twenty years, he has braved the harsh and unforgiving landscape of Afghanistan, after being inspired by the Mujahideen rising to defend their nation from a Soviet invasion in the 1980s. The Afghani never say die, and they sent the Soviets home, just as they drove back the British during the height of the Empire.
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In 1895, Rudyard Kipling famously penned a little ditty that goes: When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains, And the women come out to cut up what remains, Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains, And go to your God like a soldier.
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A century later, ain’t a damn thing changed.
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Best known for a series of posh, over-the-top cinematic extravaganzas including Moulin Rouge!, Romeo + Juliet, and The Great Gatsby, Australian film director, screenwriter, and producer Baz Luhrmann has turned his attention to the small screen with The Get Down, a twelve-episode Netflix series, which premiered on August 12, 2016. Originally budgeted at $7.5 million per episode, the show ended up costing at least $120 million, making it among the most expensive series in television history.
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Set between 1977–79, The Get Down is a fictional account of life on the streets of the South Bronx as the twin stars of Hip Hop and disco crossed paths in ways no one could have ever imagined. Attracted to this pivotal moment in American culture, Luhrmann found himself an outsider with no firsthand knowledge of the scene so he brought Nas, Grandmaster Flash, Nelson George, and Kurtis Blow, among others, into the fold to produce and consult on the project. The production was troubled with a series of starts, stops, and stalls that lead to scripts being written, discarded, and revised to such an extent that, according to Variety, some writers had taken to calling the show “The Shut Down.” Variety went on to describe The Get Down as a cautionary tale for Hollywood, but Netflix indicated they had no regrets.
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In 1994, Swedish photographer Per-Anders Pettersson (b. 1967) came to South Africa to cover the historic elections that saw Nelson Mandela become President—and he never left. Based in Cape Town, Pettersson has honed his talents on documenting stories across the continent, covering the stories the West knows so well: civil war, famine, disease. But Pettersson’s work shows not only the horrors of life, but its beauties as well—for the story of Africa is as vast, as rich, and as complex as the land itself.
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With the new millennium, global industry has become a phenomenon, bringing the four corners of the earth together as one. In doing so, emerging markets are formed, stages where local talents can shine their light to the world. Since 2010, Pettersson has been privy to a nascent scene, an industry on the come up beyond your wildest dreams.
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The U.S. Army established Fort Scott in 1842, as they began crossing expanding the nation’s boundaries by expanding onto Native American territory. It was officially laid out as a town in 1857, during a period of violent unrest infamously known as “Bleeding Kansas.” Prior to the Kansas’s admission as a free state to the Union in 1861, abolitionist and pro-slavery factions violently fought for control. Throughout the Civil War, the conflict blazed, but the war settled things and Fort Scott became one of the premier cities on the American frontier in the years leading up to the turn of the twentieth century.
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Although Kansas was always a free state, it was among 35 states in the nation to put Jim Crow laws on the books following the Civil War. Once again Kansas found itself at the center of national conflict, as its segregation laws focused on education, requiring separate schools for black students. It was not until 1954, with Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (Kansas) that the policy of “separate but equal” was declared unconstitutional.
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Rumi said, “Be the change you want to see in this world.” This is where it all begins. The power to create the world in which we want to live, to exact a future that is happening now, today, using all that exists at our fingertips. The Universe conspires to remind us of this: D.I.Y. Do It Yourself. With the major advancements in digital technology, self-publishing has returned to the forefront of our cultural consciousness. Over the past decade, self publishing has changed the landscape of the art book, introducing a new and vital means to produce and distribute work independent of the industry and its attendant challenges.
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British writer, publisher, and academic Bruno Ceschel understands the need that has emerged, a need for young artists to join the conversation and become a part of the community. He founded Self Publish, Be Happy in 2010 after inadvertently discovering a tremendous demand for new outlets for publishing—though the idea came to him by way of happenstance. Ceschel had curated an exhibition of self-published artist books for A The Photographer’s Gallery, London, and in doing so, generated a response that was large enough to propel the website he had created to share the work into a platform to showcase the latest releases of self-published authors.
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It all began with a thud against the kitchen window one day. A Tufted Titmouse gave up the ghost on photographer Leah Sobsey’s porch. Her instinct to take pictures was triggered, as were childhood memories of wooden drawers of Chicago Field’s Museum collection filled with thousands of dead birds. The birds had been collected and given the full works as taxidermy experts made them ready for viewing in their new life after death as part of one of the Museum’s many compelling natural history exhibits.
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The human urge to college, to catalogue, to organize and preserve—from where does this compulsion come? Perhaps it is purely empirical, a belief that we can only study what we possess, and that as stewards of the earth, the material realm is at our fingertips. Like many before her, Sobsey was drawn to this, and in May 2008, she was awarded a residency at the Grand Canyon.
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“The sadness will last forever.”
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The last words of Vincent Van Gogh float through my mind as I crack the spine of Destroy This Memory (Aperture). It’s entirely too much, and yet, not nearly enough, but if photographs may be an elegy, Richard Misrach has produced one of the most haunting poems for the dead and gone, the victims of Hurricane Katrina.
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Eleven years ago today, Katrina began as an interaction between a tropical wave and a tropical cyclone in the Bahamas. It quickly intensified into a Tropical Storm and made its way westward, gaining strength over the Gulf of Mexico. On August 29, it touched down in southeast Louisiana, becoming the most destructive natural disaster in United States history. Ranked one of the five most deadly hurricanes in the nation, with more than 1,800 dead, Katrina decimated the city of New Orleans.
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Sartorial style and splendor is synonymous with black culture. No matter where you go on this earth, rest assured the men and women of African descent have are freshly dressed, so much so others are quick to knock it off, as though copying was not a cardinal sin. Such are the perils of creativity: not everyone can be an originator or a pioneer. But for those who are, one thing is clear. The attention never stops. The heads will turn, the jaws will drop, and the tongues with clack because invariably style dominates.
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The Photographers’ Gallery, London, understands this and present Made You Look: Dandyism and Black Masculinity now through September 25, 2016. Curated by Ekow Eshun, the exhibition features works from taken from artists working around the world over the course of the past century, Starting with a rare series of outdoor studio prints made in 1904 from the Larry Dunstam Archive, thought to be taken in Senegal. Taken more than a century ago, the young men are nattily dressed in the latest European clothes, belying a love for the three-piece suit and accessories.
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