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Magnum photographer and documentary photojournalist Leonard Freed died November 29th at the age of 77. He is survived by his wife, Brigette, and daughter, Susanna. Magnum Photos is presenting a tribute to Freed that includes 90 of his photos.
About 800 images taken during the winter of 1942 by Dorothea Lange were unearthed in the National Archives.
Dorothea Lange is best known from her photographs of migrant farmers in the Depression for the Farm Security Administration. Seemingly unstaged and unlighted, the pictures of the internees compress intense human emotion into carefully composed frames. Nearly all of the assembly centers Lange visited, the government tried to restrict her. She was not allowed to photograph the wire fences, the watchtowers with searchlights, the armed guards or any sign of resistance and was discouraged from talking to detainees.
Lange's work shows the reality of life during this time in American history when about 110,000 men, women, and children, who abandoned their property and belongings, were herded into horse stalls and and tar-paper shacks where they suffered from brutal heat and bitter cold and filth.
From Publishers Weekly
When America's War Relocation Authority hired Dorothea Lange to photograph the internment of Japanese-Americans in 1942, they put a few restrictions on her work. Barbed wire, watchtowers and armed soldiers were off limits, they declared. And no pictures of resistance, either. They wanted the roundup and sequestering of Japanese-Americans documented—but not too well. Working within these limits, Lange, who is best known for her photographs of migrant farmers during the Depression, nonetheless produced images whose content so opposed the federal objective of demonizing Japanese-Americans that the vast majority of the photographs were suppressed throughout WWII (97% of them have never been published at all). Editors Gordon and Okihiro set this first collection of Lange's internment work within technical, cultural and historical contexts. Gordon (The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction) discusses Lange's professional methods and the formation of her "democratic-populist" beliefs. Okihiro (Whispered Silences: Japanese Americans and World War II) traces the history of prejudice against Japanese Americans, with emphasis on internees' firsthand accounts. But the bulk of the book is given over to Lange's photographs. Several of these are as powerful as her most stirring work, and the final image—of a grandfather in the desolate Manzanar Center looking down in anguish at the grandson between his knees—is worth the price of the book alone. 104 photos, 2 maps. (Nov.)
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Czech Photography VII
Leica Gallery
670 Broadway
New York City 10012
10 November - 6 January 2007
The exhibited photographs in Jiri Turek's first solo show at Leica Gallery include a part of his fashion work for the "Czech Fashion Wave."