Robert Frank, photographer & visualist

Recent articles about Robert Frank exhibit at MOMA in New York have appeared in Wall Street Journal by Luc Sante & by Anthony Lane in the New Yorker, Sept. 14, 2009.

Exhibit ends January 3, 2010.

Also, an article in NYT about Robert Frank, noticed by Matt Pearce.
See link.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/25/arts/design/25frank.html?_r=1&8dpc

BH

Extraordinary Otherness

James Baldwin, John Edgar Wideman, Luis J. Rodriguez, and Ruben Salazar--along with Hunter S. Thompson, explore what it means to be an outsider in a culture.

What do you see as common links in their themes?
How does reporting strengthen their writing?
How does their use of language and voice make their writing memorable?
How do they reference their own race, gender, class or sexual-orientation identities in their non-fiction writing?

Read aloud from each of these. See how they differ. How does the place of publication or the era of publication influence their production and the audience consumption of what they write? Considering the manifold forms of media, who or where today reports and writes the way these authors do?

What do you discover about these authors when you Google them?
For example, Luis J. Rodriguez http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0907/p02s04-lign.html

When you read them deeply?

BH

Chien-Chi Chang

The other day I showed you the amazing book, THE CHAIN (UK: Trolley, 2002) with the photographs by Chien-Chi Chang. He made the pictures at a mental asylum in Kaohsiun, Taiwan, beginning in 1993 and ending in 1999.

Here is a link to his biography. Study it to learn what you can about photography, about him, about yourself, and about our world:

http://www.magnumphotos.com/Archive/C.aspx?VP=XSpecific_MAG.Biography_VPage&AID=2K7O3R14TBS7

Here is a link to a photo archive of his pictures:

http://www.magnumphotos.com/Archive/C.aspx?VP=XSpecific_MAG.PhotographerDetail_VPage&l1=0&pid=2K7O3R14TN1D&nm=Chien-Chi%20Chang

Here is an article with a photo essay by him about the Taiwanese village where he lived as a child.

TIME Asia article:
http://www.time.com/time/asia/2003/journey/taiwan.html

BH

How The Other Half Lives: Jacob Riis

Mel Mencher, my professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, introduced me to Jacob Riis and HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES. The book opened the doorway for my lifelong journey in writing and thinking about how class, impoverishment, economic and social issues are covered in newspapers, magazines, online, books, and images.

By the 1880s in New York, social reformer Riis benefited from a new invention – flash powder. In the era of early photographic technology without artificial lighting, images required long exposures. Flash powder helped Riis to illuminate the squalor of tenement houses packed with families, filth, and the choking smoke of coal stoves. Another reformer, sociologist Lewis Hine, later would help to establish photojournalistic documentation of societal problems.

What ideas do you get from Riis? His reportage? Writing? Photography? Point of View?
How is he a journalist? How is he a social reformer? How is his writing clouded by class and ethnic blinders?

Who are his heirs?

Have you read Jonathan Kozol's Rachel and Her Children : Homeless Families in America? He also wrote stories in NEW YORKER in early 1990s about homelessness.

Who is documenting and writing about the hard edge of the working poor in Missouri? The United States? The world?

What is interesting is the slippery slope, the borderlands between working
poor and the folks who end up at St. Francis House in Columbia. A friend of mine once worked as physician and researcher at MU. He had an employee who made about $16,000
a year. She ate squirrel sandwiches on occasion, made by her grandmother.

Missouri, including Columbia, has lots of people who work hard and barely get along financially.