Posts Tagged ‘photojournalism’
“When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.”*…
Staying yesterday’s agribusiness theme: George Monbiot on the extraordinary challenges facing the world’s food system…
For the past few years, scientists have been frantically sounding an alarm that governments refuse to hear: the global food system is beginning to look like the global financial system in the run-up to 2008.
While financial collapse would have been devastating to human welfare, food system collapse doesn’t bear thinking about. Yet the evidence that something is going badly wrong has been escalating rapidly. The current surge in food prices looks like the latest sign of systemic instability.
Many people assume that the food crisis was caused by a combination of the pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine. While these are important factors, they aggravate an underlying problem. For years, it looked as if hunger was heading for extinction. The number of undernourished people fell from 811 million in 2005 to 607 million in 2014. But in 2015, the trend began to turn. Hunger has been rising ever since: to 650 million in 2019, and back to 811 million in 2020. This year is likely to be much worse.
Now brace yourself for the really bad news: this has happened at a time of great abundance. Global food production has been rising steadily for more than half a century, comfortably beating population growth. Last year, the global wheat harvest was bigger than ever. Astoundingly, the number of undernourished people began to rise just as world food prices began to fall. In 2014, when fewer people were hungry than at any time since, the global food price index stood at 115 points. In 2015, it fell to 93, and remained below 100 until 2021.
Only in the past two years has it surged. The rise in food prices is now a major driver of inflation, which reached 9% in the UK last month. [Current estimates are that it will be 9% in the U.S. as well.] Food is becoming unaffordable even to many people in rich nations. The impact in poorer countries is much worse.
So what has been going on?…
Spoiler alert: massive food producers hold too much power – and regulators scarcely understand what is happening. Sound familiar? “The banks collapsed in 2008 – and our food system is about to do the same,” from @GeorgeMonbiot in @guardian. Eminently worth reading in full.
Then iris out and consider how agricultural land is used: “Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture.”
… and consider the balance between agriculture aimed at producing food directly and agriculture aimed at producing feed and fuel: “Redefining agricultural yields: from tonnes to people nourished per hectare.”
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As we secure sustenance, we might send carefully-observed birthday greetings to Dorothea Lange; she was born on this date in 1885. A photographer and photojournalist, she is best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Lange’s photographs influenced the development of documentary photography and humanized the consequences of the Great Depression.
“Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst”*…
Doug Battenhausen spends much of his working hours searching for pictures no one else cares about.
They’re the kind taken by people would never be considered ‘photographers’, the kind that no one has even thought about for years, where any sense of artistry is purely accidental.
Instead they’re pictures of drunk friends at grotty house parties or silly sleepovers, landscapes snapped from car windows on boring drives, and assorted images that Doug can only describe as “strangely mundane”…
Learn more– and see more abandoned images– at “The internet’s forgotten shit pics are accidentally amazing,” and then visit the motherlode: Battenhausen’s Tumblr, Internet History.
* Henri Cartier-Bresson
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As we smile at serendipity, we might spare a thought for the source of today’s title quote, Henri Cartier-Bresson; he died on this date in 2004. A master of the candid and pioneer of street photography, he was one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century. With other luminaries (Robert Capa, David Seymour, and others), he founded Magnum Photos. a photographers’ co-op that covered the world for news outlets and other publishers. His Magnum coverage of of Gandhi’s funeral in India in 1948 and the last stage of the Chinese Civil War in 1949 brought him international acclaim.
View his Magnum portfolio here.
The Design of Everyday Things…
From “Improbability,” a series from Giuseppe Colarusso that depicts everyday objects transformed into unusual, unlikely, unusable versions of themselves…
See more of Colarusso’s creations here; see all of them on his web site; and read about the series on Laughing Squid.
[Readers may recognize that the title of this post is appropriated from Donald Norman’s wonderful primer on smart design…]
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As we endeavor to emulate the Eames, we might send a birthday snapshot to the father of modern photojournalism, Henri Cartier-Bresson; he was born on this date in 1908. An early master of the 35mm format, he pioneered “street shooting” and more broadly, a form of candid photography that set the model– and the standard– for generations of photojournalists who’ve followed. Indeed, after World War II (most of which he spent as a prisoner of war) and his first museum show (at MoMA in 1947), he joined Robert Capa and others in founding the Magnum photo agency, which enabled photojournalists to reach a broad audience through magazines such as Life, while retaining control over their work.
To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.
– from his book The Decisive Moment (1952)
Photography is not like painting. There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative. Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.
– from an interview in The Washington Post (1957; recounted here)
Hamburg, 1952-3 (The sign reads, “Looking for any kind of work.”)
“Nature’s inexorable imperative”*…
Bridges.
They don’t always do what they’re supposed to do.
Especially in the rainy season.
Evopropinquitous– “things I learned as a Field Biologist”
Three highly unexpected words you must keep in mind when tromping through the Amazon:
Giant.
Electric.
Eels.
Look down before you step into running water.
Wear rubber boots.
More hard-earned education at Evopropinquitous.
* “Adapt or perish, now as ever, is Nature’s inexorable imperative” – H.G. Wells
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As we recheck our rucksacks, we might send adventurous birthday greetings to Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor; he was born on this date in 1875. Grosvenor was recruited in 1899 to a small scholarly journal published by the National Geographic Society. (His benefactor was a friend of his father’s, Alexander Graham Bell, then the president of the Society (and soon, Grosvenor’s father-in-law.) Grosvenor became the journal’s first full-time editor, and began to build it, developing its extraordinary photographic service and map department. Revenue from growing circulation supported expeditions– which supplied more remarkable photos and maps… Membership grew from 900 in 1899 to more than 2 million at the time of his retirement (by then, as President of the Society) in 1955.
“Altering life by holding it still”*…
The first of a series of multimedia essays on photography and photojournalism; quoth Leica…
Building on their shared history, Magnum and Leica agreed to collaborate on a series of projects that continue their longstanding dedication to independent documentary photography. Beginning in the spring of 2011, Leica will sponsor the creation of a series of independently-produced multimedia essays that will highlight the personal journeys and insatiable curiosity of Magnum photographers. The stories will be published at the homepages of Magnum Photos, LFI Magazine, and Leica.
And for readers who are inspired, some riveting advice from the extraordinary Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee, the photo-documentarian of the underside of New York life in the 30s, 40s, and 50s…
* “Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still”- Dorothea Lange
As we adjust our f-stops, we might recall that it was on this date in 1947 that player-manager Mel Ott of the (then New York) Giants hit his 511th and final career home run. Ott, the first National League player to hit 500 home runs, managed the Giants from 1942-48, during which stretch the Giant’s best finish was 3rd place. It was in refeence to Ott’s easy-going stewardship of the Giants that then-Dodgers manager Leo Durocher made his oft-quoted (albeit somewhat out-of-context) remark, “Nice guys finish last!”
Baseball card on which Ott struck an uncharacteristically-fierce pose (source)
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