See the same photo over at the Online Archive of California (host of the Dorothea Lange Collection, 1919-1965).
“Included in the museum’s archive are approximately 2,500 prints and over 2,000 negatives by Lange dated from 1935 to 1939 when she worked for the Resettlement Administration (RA) and the Farm Security Administration (FSA). […] In the summer of 1935, Lange transferred from SERA to the newly formed Resettlement Administration (RA), established in May 1935 by the executive order of Franklin D. Roosevelt as part of his New Deal. The RA.s mandate was to ease the nation.s rural poverty through programs that included low-interest loans to farmers, land-renewal projects, and the resettlement and rehabilitation of the rural poor. Lange was hired as the only photographer investigator to work for the western regional office in Berkeley and on national assignments as designated. Concurrently, Taylor was appointed as a regional labor advisor in the same office. Together they were responsible for a five-state region including California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico , and Utah.” (more).
“Dorothea Lange (May 26, 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.” (learn more about Dorothea Lange on Wikipedia).
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About:
“ABEL RAISES CAIN is an unprecedented glimpse into the life and bizarre career of infamous underground media prankster, Alan Abel. Over the past half-century, Abel has made a name for himself several times over with stunts that are just ridiculous enough to be believable, especially to a media that feeds on salacious, far-fetched stories. Alan’s daughter, Jenny, tells her firsthand account of what it was like growing up with this lovable but slightly demented prankster for a father.”
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The Fight, Norman Mailer, 1975
“There are sporting events that transcend the world of sports, and the 1974 heavyweight title fight in which Muhammad Ali regained his crown by improbably kayoing George Foreman in the middle of the African night was certainly one of them. Metaphorically, it was a writer’s dream: two imposing black warriors, one all grace, the other brute force, one the iconoclast, the other the blind patriot, battling each other. Fatefully, the appropriate writer threw his pen into the ring. Norman Mailer’s masterful account goes far beyond the ropes to capture the primal ethos of the sport, the larger social canvas this particular fight was drawn on, and the remarkable cast of personalities—not the least of which is Mailer himself—who converged to make this “Rumble in the Jungle” a landmark in sports history and a clear knockout in Mailer’s journalistic portfolio.” (Amazon)
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 | A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read ‘The Lost Symbol’, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it. |
Very interesting article offering a critic of the “long tail” model developped by Wired editor Chris Anderson. The article was written last November. By now, Avatar has become the second highest grossing film of all time, just behind Titanic (1997). In the summer of 1998, a few months after the success of Titanic, the relative failure of Godzilla had some analyst wondering if the “blockbuster era” was coming to an end. At the time, Peter Bart (then Variety’s editor-in-chief) offered a good portrait of the situation in his book The Gross (Amazon link).
Previously on Skandalon: First feedback from audience and critics for James Cameron’s Avatar
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“And then, suddenly, there’s Frame 16.
Out of nowhere. Nothing to prepare you for it in the previous exposures. Frame 16. One of the most enduring images of America from the mid-20th century, seeming to express in a single frame (a frame divided by frames) the hierarchy and separation imposed by race and gender.
It is Robert Frank’s “Trolley — New Orleans,” but less than an inch high, on one of the contact sheets that are part of the retrospective exhibition, “Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through Sunday.” (read more)
“Robert Frank (born November 9, 1924), born in Zürich, Switzerland, is an important figure in American photography and film. His most notable work, the 1958 photographic book titled simply The Americans, was heavily influential in the post-war period, and earned Frank comparisons to a modern-day de Tocqueville for his fresh and skeptical outsider’s view of American society. Frank later expanded into film and video and experimented with compositing and manipulating photographs.” (Wikipedia).
Robert Frank’s book The Americans deeply influenced Robert Bergman’s work.
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About this exhibition: “Using a handheld 35mm camera and available light, Robert Bergman spent 12 years making a series of large color portraits that address not only his subjects’ physical presence but also their psychic state. Drawing on his finely tuned sense of form and an ability to establish a rapport with his subjects, he never sensationalized or objectified them. Instead, he explored their penetrating gazes, downcast eyes, or distant stares to reveal their startling array of emotions—suspicion with curiosity; despair with resilience—thus making clear each individual’s “strength and delicacy,” as Schapiro noted.” (read more). See the press checklist in PDF. The NGA offers other interesting online ressources here.
The book is available for sale over at Amazon.
About Robert Bergman: “Born in New Orleans in 1944, Bergman’s father was a doctor and his mother was a Shakespearean actress. He first began to photograph as a child and seriously embraced the medium in his early twenties. In the mid 1960s, he was deeply influenced by Robert Frank’s book The Americans. Like so many other “street photographers” of that generation, he abandoned the large-format view camera he had previously employed and began to use a 35mm format to make black-and-white photographs in the American urban environment. Although he worked in the rapidly changing cityscape, he, unlike many of his contemporaries, increasingly sought out quiet, meditative moments.
In the 1980s, Bergman began to make color photographs that combine the saturated and muted hues of both the city and his subjects’ attire to achieve a rich, painterly idiom. He resides in Minneapolis and New York City.” (read more)
Other Bergman’s exhibitions are currently being held by the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York and the Yossi Milo Gallery. Open the Yossi Milo’s press booklet in PDF (it contains, among others, article by The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post : follow the links to enjoy these articles on their respective website).
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“Norman Percevel Rockwell (February 3, 1894 – November 8, 1978) was a 20th century American painter and illustrator. His works enjoy a broad popular appeal in the United States, where Rockwell is most famous for the cover illustrations of everyday life scenarios he created for The Saturday Evening Post magazine over more than four decades. (Wikipedia)
Read “The History Behind Norman Rockwell and the Saturday Evening Post Covers” over at the Norman Rockwell Museum of Vermont website.
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