Aussie Photographer Tracey Moffatt

On Friday, September 14th after work I headed on down to the Chelsea Barnes & Noble for an artist meet & greet/book launch of The Moving Images of Tracey Moffatt by Catherine Summerhayes. Both Tracy and Catherine were on hand to discuss the book - a monograph and survey of Moffatt's film and photography, characterized as Summerhayes put it by "that feeling of anticipation, that anything is possible..."

Moffatt is gorgeous woman in her 40s whose features seem to be a mixture of Australia's indigenous and European cultures. This was her first book launch in New York City and she was visibly nervous, yet I also got the feeling that her frenetic energy was just a relevation of her own personality. She responded to the audience's questions with quirky and quick-witted answers.

Originally trained in college as a photographer, Moffatt boasted that she "didn't plan on being an artist" and "always wanted to be Roman Polanski." She and her schoolmates didn't do much work and just sat around the Brisbane coffeeshops waxing poetic about filmakers like Fellini. Since then, Moffatt has made a living off of her photography and film work that she described as being mostly autobiographical.

Moffatt's "Love" video is currently on view at the Brookly Museum's "Global Feminisms" exhibit. The video itself is a montage of scenes from famous movies - cut into 2 parts: the first half shows footage of women being slapped/hit by their male counterparts while the second half delivers the payback with women shooting/crushing their male oppressors. As Summerhayes put it, the video is quite violent due mostly to its quick editing - each scene a back-to-back, rapid-fire burst of hurt and anger that makes your blood boil.

Currently Moffatt is working on a new film with a "revolution" theme for the upcoming Sidney Biennale. Typically her work focuses on complex subjects like sexuality, history, identity, representation and race. Though it seems to me that Moffatt isn't trying to convey any specific judgement (good or bad) on any of these themes - she's just portraying the truth of her life and her environment. At the end of the book launch she said she's been working on a film script for over 10 years - but if all her work is autobiographical, will she ever be able to finish it?

View some of Tracey Moffatt's work online or go buy her book!

Photo: self portrait by Tracey Moffatt

New Work by Sebastiao Salgado

Sebastiao Salgado, 64, is probably the best-known Brazilian photographer (and arguably the "world's most widely viewed") of our time.

I just came across an article in the UK Times online by Adam Sage about his latest exhibition titled In Principio (In the Beginning), at Gallery 32 in Green Street, London. The show centers on an ironic subject for Salgado: the coffee industry. I say ironic because Salgado's father "had a coffee shelling plant on the farm he bought in the Rio Doce valley in south east Brazil in 1948."

Though he sounds a bit defensive, I appreciated this honest quote in the article from Salgado:

“I have no claim to be a social photographer. People stuck that label on me, but I do a lot of commercial work like everyone else. I am not a political militant, I’m a photographer and that’s all. I am from a poor country and I have spent a lot of time working in poor countries. I don’t photograph them to make the rich feel guilty. I photograph them because it’s my life, it’s what I like doing.”

Read more and see images from the show.

Salgado doesn't quite qualify as a photographer who's been "dodged & burned" from art history, but all of us as photographers, artists, humans can learn from the reality and truth that is captured in his imagery.

His work fascinates me because it's mostly documentary (freezing real time in photo) but there's such a surreal quality to it because the subject matter is often disturbing/shocking/unfathomable to our first-world minds and the way he manipulates light to work with B&W film and/or digital capture is almost dream like.

Photo by Jim Watson

James Presley Ball: African-American daguerreotypist

We've all heard about iconic Black photographers like Gordon Parks and James VanDerZee, but today I found out about the "founder of African-American photography," James P. Ball. I've never seen his name in any of the photography history books I've read in my 15+ years of study...

Here's an excerpt about this pioneer who also used his profession for social change, from BlackPast.org:

"The daguerreotypist James Presley (J.P.) Ball was born in 1825 in Virginia, probably a freeman. As a young man he learned daguerreotyping and opened his first studio in Cincinnati at age twenty. The city was a center for anti-slavery activity as well as the photographic arts, and Ball became a leader in both. He wrote and published a pamphlet depicting the horrors of slavery to accompany a large panorama in his gallery, and served as the official photographer for a celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. By the 1850s, his business had achieved tremendous success. Frederick Douglass, Jenny Lind, and the orator Henry H. Garnet, among other notables, sought out his services, and he became quite affluent."

Read more about J.P. Ball.

Yau Leung "was to Hong Kong what Robert Doisneau was to Paris"

Britney Spears' tired and talent-less performance on the VMAs is on the lips and screens of people throughout the world but true artists like Yau Leung die before they can even garner public recognition.

I myself found out about Leung through a TIME magazine article by Liam Fitzpatrick.

Midway through the piece, Leung is compared to photography masters Robert Doisneau and Henri Cartier-Bresson:

"Yau released a small selection of photographs in 1992, in the now unobtainable Lo Fung Stories ("Lo Fung" is the archaic literary name for Hong Kong). It was a masterpiece of editing, and a stunning publishing debut: here was a major photographic talent, arriving on the bookshelf or coffee table in a fully formed state and with images that practically hummed with love for the city and its proletariat. "I was born here, I have always lived here and all my work is here," Yau said in the foreword. In his sense of place, he was to Hong Kong what Robert Doisneau was to Paris — a chronicler in black and white of the sooty streets and ordinary people at his city's heart. But in his consummate sensitivity to the decisive moment, Yau was sometimes reminiscent of the great Henri Cartier-Bresson, and, like the French master, carried wherever he went a 35-mm camera — in Yau's case a Voigtlander Prominent — allowing him to move and shoot unobtrusively amid the throng."

I also found a fairly large archive of his work for sale online.

America Ferrera Is My Hero

I got nothing but LOVE for this talented, brave and pioneering young woman. Why is it that the U.S. media and the Hollywood Hate Machine insists on making her into something she's not? Is she more digestible if she's thinner and more Anglo? Will her TV show's ratings rocket more than they already have? The photo you're seeing here is the upcoming October issue of Glamour magazine.

Yes Ladies, this obviously-doctored photo of America Ferrera will be hitting your newsstands soon. I'd say we should all boycott the mag and not buy it, but then again, there's something almost destructive in that action because the more copies this month sells with America on the cover, the better the chances will be to have future Latinas gracing our glossies.

Read more sarcastic but painfully honest coverage of the America's Glamour cover at Guanabee.