Category: Photography

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Legendary Chinatown Photographer Corky Lee dies from Covid

  • (The Village Sun Obit)

    Lee, who was a gentle soul, went by the whimsical moniker the “undisputed unofficial Asian American photographer laureate.” For 50 years, starting in the 1970s, he documented Manhattan’s Chinatown and the city’s Asian-American and Pacific Islander communities.


    (Photo by Corky Lee)
    Throwing a hook: Japanese American teacher was secret women’s boxing trailblazer

    Corky Lee wiki

    Corky Lee (born as Lĭ Yángguó; 1947 – January 27, 2021) was an American journalistic photographer. His work chronicled and explored the diversity and nuances of Asian American culture overlooked by mainstream media and made sure Asian American history was included as a part of American history

    Photographic Justice
    See photo of Grace Lee Boggs and Mr. Mirikitani (Previous post, The Cats of Mirikitani)

    Corky Lee poses with his 1982 photograph of striking garment workers, featured in the New York Historical Society’s exhibition Chinese American: Exclusion/Inclusion. “It was the largest Chinese garment worker rally in the history of NYC. 15,000 showed up to lobby for a new contract – it was pretty monumental. Fifteen, twenty years after that, the garment industry is no longer a viable employment source for the Chinese immigrant community, but back in the day, at least one person in the family had to work for the union, because that was the source of health insurance. Because there was absolutely no health insurance in the laundries and restaurants.” Corky was still in high school when he began noticing the absence of Chinese Americans in the media and newspapers around him – even the historic photograph of the completion of the transcontinental railroad, built by Chinese labor, didn’t have any Chinese workers in it. He has been committed to making his community visible ever since, photographing not only Chinatown but Asian America for more than four decades. The 68 y.o. Queens native has been the country’s self-appointed, undisputed, Unofficial Asian American Photographer Laureate for so long that even the post office agrees: a letter addressed to just this title in “Elmhurst, Queens” actually found its way to the photographer.

    photo via
    Creator: Katja Heinemann | Credit: Katja Heinemann
    Copyright: © Katja Heinemann

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    Passion of W.Eugene Smith – A Sublime Photojournalist

  • Amer. Army nurse 2nd Lieut. Florence Vehmeier walking past GI w. bullet wound in his stomach & rubber tube taped to his lip which drains his stomach through his nose to bucket on the floor in makeshift hospital in Cens Cathedral, during WWII.
  • WORLD WAR II. The Pacific Campaign. February 1945. The Battle of Iwo Jima (Japanese island). US Marine demolition team blasting out a cave on Hill 382.

  • Magnum Photos – W. Eugene Smith
    (Died: October 15, 1978, Tucson, AZ Smith was 59 years old.)


  • (Woman bathing her daughter, a victim of mercury poisoning, Minamata, Japan 1971)

    It has been called photojournalism’s Pieta. In 1971, Smith and his wife, photographer Aileen Mioko, moved to the
    Japanese village of Minamata for three years.
    Many regard this as the first photograph to awaken the world to ecological abuse. Page 525 – The Great Life Photographers.

  • Charlie CHAPLIN. 1952.
    Buster KEATON (left) and Charlie CHAPLIN (right) during the shooting of the movie “Limelight”, starring Charlie CHAPLIN, Sidney CHAPLIN, Claire BLOOM and Buster KEATON.

    See more photos of Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight set here.


  • (Nun Waiting for Survivors, Andrea Doria, 1956)

  • Minamata Homage to W. Eugene Smith
    (More photos here)

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    The Pointillist Detail, Photos of Jürgen Schadeberg, RIP

  • (Hans Prignitz’s handstand on the St. Michaelis Church, Hamburg 1948 )

    African photography Jurgen Schadeberg

    Jurgen Schadeberg Artistic Eye

    Obituary: The pointillist detail and zen brush strokes of Jürgen Schadeberg

  • Jurgen Schadeberg homepage


  • Nelson Mandela


  • Exclusive Interview (Flashbak)

    At the start of his teens, Schadeberg was forced into the Hitler Youth. He hated it and everything it represented. Sometimes he marched backwards, or wore bright colours instead of the standard issue brown shirt. On other occasions he mimicked Charlie Chaplin as der Führer.

    Miriam Makeba

  • Jurgen Schadeberg’s Portrait of Singers in 1950’s South Africa

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    Comic Cat, Lit Cat, Film Noir Cat – 2020


  • Edward Gorey loved cat and Balanchine (previous post)

    The Cop and Peter Cook the Comic Genius

  • Doris Lessing
    Doris Lessing archive here.

    Herman 1HermanHesse
    and the Cat.    . another photo from writing & the feline muse.

    Herman Hesse – The Glass Bead Game

  • Yuichi Hibi – Neco hibineko

    Kay Ryan
    A CAT/A FUTURE

    A cat can draw
    the blinds
    behind her eyes
    whenever she
    decides. Nothing
    alters in the stare
    itself but she’s
    not there. Likewise
    a future can occlude:
    still sitting there,
    doing nothing rude.

  • Patricia Highsmith (archive) 1patriciaJeannette

  • <> <> <> Samuel-Beckett-waits-for-the-Dog-and-Cat

    Samuel Beckett Archive

  • 1artChase,-Louisa
    Louisa Chase

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    David Goldblatt – South African Photographer (1930–2018)


  • Via

    David Goldblatt, ‘The salute of the banned African National Congress at the graves of four assassinated black community leaders’, Cradock, Eastern Cape, South Africa, 20 July, 1985, gelatin-silver print. Museum no. E.112-1992, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London


    Art Net David Goldblatt

  • <> <>
    (Cafe de Move On Johnnesburg 1964)

  • Marian Goodman Gallery- / Structures of Dominion & Democracy

  • (Guardian obit in 2018)
    Art and Design – David Goldblatt (See more wonderful photos here)

    David Goldblatt A Monument to Apartheid In Fietas

  • <> <> <>

    Carvings for Sale on William Nicol Drive , 1999

  • Miriam Mazibuko waters the garden of her RDP house for which she waited eight years. It consists of one room. Her four children live with her in-laws. Extension 8, Far East Alexandra Township, 12 September 2006

  • Picture Protest – Frieze

  • Art Net David Goldblatt

    David Goldblatt was South African photographer known for his uncompromising images of his country during apartheid and afterward. “I was very interested in the events that were taking place in the country as a citizen but, as a photographer, I’m not particularly interested, and I wasn’t then, in photographing the moment that something happens. I’m interested in the conditions that give rise to events,” he once explained. Born on November 29, 1930 in Randfontein, South Africa, he began photographing at an early age but his father’s illness required Goldblatt to run his family business while studying at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg. After selling the company in 1963, Goldblatt focused entirely on a career in photography. His involvement with various artistic circles in Johannesburg granted him access to a broad range of ethnic and socioeconomic groups.

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    RIP John Loengard Life Photographer of Natural Look

  • Georgia O’Keefe
    (On her roof, Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, 1967)


  • Henry Moore’s Sheep Piece,Much Hadham, England 1983

  • FLORIDA, UNITED STATES – FEBRUARY 1964: (L-R) Paul McCartney, George Harrison, John Lennon & Ringo Starr of the Beatles, taking a dip in a swimming pool . (Photo by John Loengard/Life Magazine/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images)

  • John Loengard

    Harvard Crimson Obit

    Photographer John B. Loengard ’56, Whose Eye Saw Things Others’ Could Not, Dies at 85

    Jill Krementz, a photographer and close friend of Loengard, said he will be remembered not only for his contributions to photography, but also for his character.


  • Furniture maker George Nakashima, New Hope, Pa (photo by John Loengard)

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    RIP Elsa Dorfman (1937-2020) – Boston Portrait Photographer

  • Elsa Dorfman Homepage
    (Harvey Silverglate, Elsa Dorfman, Allen Ginsberg, December 21, 1995.)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=3trVUS65t2s&feature=emb_logo
    Eroll Morris (documentary filmmaker on Elsa Dorfman The B-Side)

    Elsa Dorfman

    American portraitist Elsa Dorfman, known for her intimate large-format Polaroids of friends, artists, celebrities, and herself, has died at age eighty-three from kidney failure, the Boston Globe reports.

  • Harvard Magazin on Elsa Dorfman

  • Elsa Dorfman Wiki

    Raising awareness
    Dorfman suggested elements of healing through her work in a variety of ways. She photographed terminal cancer patients, emphasizing their dignity. In 1995, she collaborated with graphic artist Marc A. Sawyer to illustrate the booklet 40 Ways to Fight the Fight Against AIDS. She photographed people, both with and without AIDS, each engaged in one of forty activities that might help AIDS victims in their daily life. The photographs were exhibited 1995 at the Lotus Development Corporation in Cambridge, in Provincetown and in New York City. The artist donated the costs of producing the photographs for this project.[16]

    Dorfman co-starred in the documentary No Hair Day (1999) as she’s taking the portraits of three women undergoing treatment for breast cancer

  • Robert Creeley
    The above image shows two books by     Robert Creeley, the one pictured is Elsa’s Housebook which I bought on my first trip to Boston.

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    Photos of Michiko Kon – Mistress of the Dark

  • More photos (Pinterest)


  • (Self Portrait)

    Japan Times -Arts, Mistress of the dark

    Some of Kon’s recent work has been created in Mexico and it’s not difficult to see a correspondence between their macabre festivity and the visual traditions of the Day of the Dead festivities. In a pointed departure from her usual depiction of imaginary and/or inanimate, objects, Kon appears in a self-portrait with her face made up as a skull. She cradles a doll in her lap with one hand, while holding on to the brim of her sombrero with the other, as though it might blow away in the wind. It’s an odd mix of poised calculation and kitschy tourist snapshot that doesn’t fit comfortably with the main body of her work.