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).

Compare Lange’s photo with this photo by French photographer Raymond Depardon (from his book Errance, 2000)

Browse over 2500 of Adam’s photographs over at the Center for Creative Photography hosted by the University of Arizona Libraries.

Previously on Skandalon

“Raymond Depardon (b. 6 July 1942, Villefranche-sur-Saône, France) is a French photographer, photojournalist and documentary filmmaker. In 1966, Depardon co-founded the photojournalism agency Gamma. He has been a member of Magnum Photos since 1979. Depardon is also the author of several documentary shorts and feature films notably including 1974, une partie de campagne, on the 1974 presidential campaign of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Reporters (1981) and New York, N.Y. (1986), both winners of the César Award for best short documentary, La captive du Désert (1990), nominated for the Palme d’Or at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival and Délits flagrants (1994) which won awards for best feature documentary at the César Awards, the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (Joris Ivens award) and the Vancouver International Film Festival.” (wikipedia)

Raymond Depardon at Magnum Photos.

Artist’s statement:

“This photography project looked at childrens’ dream jobs, projecting the current employment problems onto one of the few timeless themes throughout childrens’ fantasies; Superheroes.”

Previously on Skandalon

The photo comes from the official website of Yellowstone National Park : visit the “Visitor Activities” section of the Yellowstone Digital File Slide to find more.

Image above taken from the Boobytraps series (2008):

“The last series, Boobytraps, is not photographic in nature, but has every thing to do with spread ing ter ror and cre at ing an atmosphere of invisible menace that sur­rounds us everywhere and could hit any of us any time. Taken from two US Army field manuals they show soldiers how to construct boobytraps out of literally every­thing available in the world of every day objects, including pipes, beds, couches and chocolates.” (read more)

Artist’s statement about his Boobytraps series:

“I have taken these images from two books “Boobytraps” (1965) and “Unconventional Warfare Devices and Techniques - References” (1966). These are two “Army Field Manuals” of the US Army. In these books, soldiers are taught to construct boobytraps out of literally everything available. The key point of these two books is not how to detect these exploding traps but how to construct them.

The basic idea of building a trap out of - let´s say - a tea kettle is to spread terror. If a simple tea kettle might be a bomb that could kill or maim me what is there left to trust. Everything might be a bomb and therefore, in the head of the potential victim,everything IS a trap.”

See the whole Boobytraps series. The complete catalog can be dowloaded in PDF (Texts German, 3.12MB). Here is Simon Menner official website.

About Mr. Deane:

“Mrs. Deane is a blog run by Beierle + Keijser, visual artists from respectively Ger­many and Holland. It is named in after a spiritistic medium from the beginning of the 20th century. For us, Mrs. Deane stands for the ambiguous and the undecidable that one finds one selfconfronted with near the borders of the perceptible and the prob­able. Here, every man has to decide for him self what he holds to be true and what not.” (read more)

Artist’s statement:

“On a quiet winter night, I looked out a window. I could see a building far away, the windows where illuminated, and I could vaguely make out people inside their apartments. When I imagined what they might be doing, my mind fluttered between wild fantasies and mundane clichés. I was curious to compare my expectations to the reality of their lives. After months of continuous observation in different parts of the city I collected hundreds of photographs of strange, comical, and often haunting moments. At times, I was lucky enough to catch a glimpse of human nature when it was not guarded, not self-conscious and completely uninhibited. This provided me with a stage where it was possible to observe myself in the most secret and vulnerable moments of others.” (read more).

See more press coverage for this specific series.

I first became aware of the Dioramas series via Modcult.

See more of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s dioramas on his officiel website. Artist’s statement:

“Upon first arriving in New York in 1974, I did the tourist thing. Eventually I visited the Natural History Museum, where I made a curious discovery: the stuffed animals positioned before painted backdrops looked utterly fake, yet by taking a quick peek with one eye closed, all perspective vanished, and suddenly they looked very real. I’d found a way to see the world as a camera does. However fake the subject, once photographed, it’s as good as real.”

PBS website has a page about Hiroshi Sugimoto offering multiple videos, interviews, bio, slideshow, etc. He was featured in the episode “memory” during the third season of PBS’s ongoing series Art In The Twenty-First Century. You can watch the whole episode online.

Previously on Skandalon

Artist statement:

“The word electricity is thought to derive from the ancient Greek elektron, meaning “amber.” When subject to friction, materials such as amber and fur produce an effect that we now know as static electricity. Related phenomena were studied in the eighteenth century, most notably by Benjamin Franklin. To test his theory that lightning is electricity, in 1752 Franklin flew a kite in a thunderstorm. He conducted the experiment at great danger to himself; in fact, other researchers were electrocuted while conducting similar experiments. He not only proved his hypothesis, but also that electricity has positive and negative charges. In 1831, Michael Faraday’s formulation of the law of electromagnetic induction led to the invention of electric generators and transformers, which dramatically changed the quality of human life. Far less well-known is that Faraday’s colleague, William Fox Talbot, was the father of calotype photography. Fox Talbot’s momentous discovery of the photosensitive properties of silver alloys led to the development of positive-negative photographic imaging. The idea of observing the effects of electrical discharges on photographic dry plates reflects my desire to re-create the major discoveries of these scientific pioneers in the darkroom and verify them with my own eyes.” (artist’s official website)

About PDN :

“PDN Photo of the Day displays photographs selected by the editors of Photo District News, a publication for photo professionals.” (read more).

Previously on Skandalon

Artist statement:

“These photographs of albatross chicks were made on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.

To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, none of the plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the untouched stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world’s most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.”

To learn more, visit Chris Jordan official website.