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The smell of fixer is one of my oldest memories of photography and my dad’s Nikon SP and the black Besseler enlarger would eventually become part of my own path into photography. Robert Levin was a writer at heart, and didn’t flatter himself with comparisons to the pros of the day, who happened also to be his professional associates and friends, but took some pleasure in his creations. As an editor, he assigned Henri Cartier-Bresson to photograph Dr. Anthony Pisicano, a local Long Beach pediatrician, and the Frenchman visited or house. Weegee passed by the house once, and Life’s Bill Ray photographed our family for a Life Magazine. Bob’s photography books were among my earliest photographic influences, although the truth is that I came to photography in my 20’s, and that his friendship with Howard Chapnick of Black Star, who also lived in Long Beach, was a major door-opener for me.

When my father passed away in the early 70’s I was given two large boxes by his secretary at Redbook Magazine, containing thousands ofj prints, negatives and personal papers from his childhood in the Bronx, where he attended Dewitt Clinton High School amd eventually the City University of New York and then Columbia. Like many of the upwardly mobile Jewish families living in the Bronx, the Levins had begun a slow migration to Long Island. For Alfred and Frances Levin and their two boys, Long Beach was the preferred summertime residence. Alfred was a jewelry salesman, first travelling in the South and than opening up his own business in the Jewelry Exchange on 47th Street. America was both affluent and expanding, and young adults were mobile and interested in things like Kodak Brownie cameras, which were extremely popular and easy to use, and made photography available to the growing American middle class. The first section of pictures taken in Long Beach, of Bob and his friends were made with one of them.

Robert served in the military during World War II as a writer for Stars and Stripes, the army’s newspaper. But he returned to Europe after the war with my mother, Martha, and spent a year, writing and photographing extensively, this time with a black Rollei twin lens reflex camera. These photographs are among most interesting, moody still-lifes and landscapes, often inspired, or so she jokingly insisted, by the direction of my mother, who had studied art history, and considered herself to have the finer eye of the two. In fact, she took full credit for his ability with the camera.

After returning to New York, Robert freelanced as a writer for men’s magazines like Pageant and Coronet, writing detective stories and doing interviews with celebrities like Elizabeth Taylor and Jacqueline Kennedy. The young couple lived in Long Beach in a rented apartment, and looked foward to a bright future in a country of expanding opportunity. I was born in New York City in 1950, and with my sister Peri followed two years later Before settling in and buying a house with a GI Loan, my parents decided to return to Europe, and the four of us we sailed off to France pn the Liberte. We lived in England, France, Spain and Italy, and my dad continued to freelance for the men’s magazines. typing off manuscripts and mailing them off to his editors in New York. By this time he had purchased a Nikon 35mm camera which had become the rage in photography and was aware of the work of Cartier-Bresson, as he was of the progressive writers like Jean-Paul Satre, and of course the American Henry Miller, and in our little family he had a opportunity to document what was a very idyllic and transformational time. He liked street photography, but some of the most compelling images are clearly of his own family. I don’t remember him posing any pictures, he was definitely a bit of a lurker. He rolled his own film, and developed much of it in a portable darkroom.

The family returned to Long Island so that I could begin school. We bought a Levitt house in Long Beach, and eventually Bob would take an editorial position in Manhattan at Redbook Magazine and commuted by train or car from Long Beach. The photographs from this time period are less candid and more representative of special events, a school play or graduation, or a family gathering. Eventually he was able to purchase a larger home in nearby Lido Beach very close to the water and it is here that the photographs tapered off. A divorce, a new life in Manhattan, made photography more of an afterthought, and less of a passion. There was less time, and certainly much less time for the family on Long Island.
What has become clear to me, is that the camera and the photographs of the family represented a vision of what family life was supposed to be, rather than the reality of what it was, or what perhaps what my father was.

My own career as a photography, if you could call it a career, has roots in the work of my father’s pictures. My comfort about the camera, came directly as a result of its presence as an indicator of love. I started with the Nikon SP that was used for all of his European work, although by this time the SLR had become the magazine photographer’s workhorse, and I quickly gravitated to the newer cameras, for better or worse, and the eventual assignments that took me all over the world and allowed me more success than I ever thought possible as a professional photographer.

But looking back at my father’s pictures, what impresses me most is that some of the most meaningful images that we can take are of things that are of our families, our friends, our communities, and the moments of our lives that are worth preserving. All photographs are proof that something happened and a way to mark our time as we live our days, one at a time. The increased volume of images, from cell-phone cameras, digital SLRS and the like as easy to use as they are, doesn’t really change the reason for using a camera. And I can only wonder what the children of today will see forty years from now when looking back
at the images taken by their parents. Will they be nostalgic for the 2010s? Probably so,

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China: The Past is a Foreign Country

My grandparents fled the People’s Republic of China and entered the Republic of China in 1949. I was left with them after my birth in 1979 when my parents entered the US. Memories from then are faint and perhaps uneventful, except a slight sense of desire for my mother. I went to elementary school in the US but was brought back to Taiwan for high school and I struggled to fit in. Dropping out of college, I fled from Taiwan in 1999 and moved to New York City, without a friend, and forever an orphan of childhood love I’d never experienced.

Recurring nightmare since then: feeling the sky folding downward, slowly and steadily, over my self, drones within my skull, my jaws tight, body stiff and hammered down. At age five, I met my mother and she watched over me to ensure that my afternoon nap was taken. My back towards her and I pretended to be dead.

I oscillate in between the here and the elsewhere of my imaginary, sketching forth a landscape ruins in reverse, a melancholy before the melancholic journey arises, dissipating before the completion of dreams, preemptive dreams striking upon the memory of the future. I’m a stranger to myself with an address that changes without end, drifting from one town to the next, following footfalls into transit stops and transitory playgrounds and onto a dystopic drawing board of sorts.

I can’t fully digest the details of the world, breathing its smoke and smog, and all the petty whispers and pretty lies circulating in my lungs, engulfing what’s left of me, and in no act can the gnawing space between us be relieved.

Photographing is like catching mosquitoes buzzing ceaselessly in one’s dark room.

The negative images projected in the dark room are my silent quarrels with the world, and imperfect and precarious as they may be, I scratch the smallest speckles of light against the dissolving surfaces of fogged and out-dated photographic paper, anticipating the blacks of my desire to reverse, like moths with the lights out.

The lone hit man in exits the room, turns back to glance, the caged bird is still alive.

Walking into the quake aftermath and searching through the artifacts that remain with the living, my presence felt though not affecting quantitatively the conditions I saw. We exist in the menagerie as we know, and that is enough, the flood of chance, the ritualistic fire, the afternoon shade, and we move on, in miniature alterations, to each our disquietude.

Our man in Chengdu drives us anywhere we want, almost running over a cop only to yell “out of the way” or something in local Sichuanese, and driving on, here to honk is a normal gesture saying that “I’m here.” One night into an hour driving on quake ridden mountain roads (daytime its beautiful despite the damaged cars and voided railings over steep drops, but night changes all…) cutting pass cars, quite tense even for our driver, especially since it was all silent, the horn died along the way… What was that 50s French film with Yves Montand driving through the night transporting nitroglycerine tanks cautiously on uneven roads and one fatal bump would ignite all?

We sneak through under a covered rickshaw, to see the site of a collapsed school with the memorials of dead children, was it nine or ten thousand that died? There were parents mourning (I saw) and protesting (I saw not). Soon a cop takes us out, jotted down our passport numbers, and escorted us away.

There is always a side path into the towns left half intact, debris everywhere and the white powder covering grounds where corpses once laid.

Headed back down the mountain roads, stopped in a village, became center of attention, everyone hospitable and highly alert, reminded me somehow of the ancient tale by Tao Yuanming, then an informer of the village informs of our arrival. We’re scooted off again as foreign crazies with cameras, passed through another village, another checkpoint.

A family living in a ramshackle, the 6 year-old girl curiously modeling for me, I’m offered chicken and corn wine, the best meal I’ve had in days.

I walk bravely, into the cops, chatted a bit, waited for orders, gave them 2 films (I’d shot 10-15 rolls), got them back, promising not to publish negative views of China back home to them foreigners, that’s that, no use bribing cops with cigarettes but I feel semi-pro now dealing with them. The flooded areas caused by massive landslides I couldn’t reach, too many checkpoints, one would take days to find alternate footpaths.

I arrive weeks after the Sichuan quake: the dead had been buried or burnt en masse, so I see only the living, in the tennis court that is a temporary hospital and makeshift shelters dotting the periphery alongside the fallen boulders.

In this dirt world but not of this dirt world, we seem to exist: constant washing and rewashing of towels to wipe off the summer sweat, the summer dirt, and the winter dirt.

One may consider Chongqing if one may choose to die, exit the cable car over the Yangtze river, gulping her ancient thick silt, away past boatmen with curious eyes. This vertigo city, built upon mountains and endless stairs and in between the footpaths, dropping us into our nights, traversing from house to pavements spackled with blackened spit to ground drillings for yet another modern tower to foot massage parlors (the girls inside watching television) filled with grilled chickens and tossed away bones, fusing below what is called one’s head, and high above, vapors from the river spirals forth towards an unknown future that neon KTV lights disguise as intoxication.

The flooded town sees itself in the dirt roads leading to the river swallowing all, and on boats, livestock wait desperately to be slaughtered and scale upon the signs of futures index. Memoirs of an overdevelopment, it is 2008 and I arrive too late, the new city towers visibly above the opaque ruins that one calls history, slanted and crooked along a deep slope, the local officials installing a grand staircase and cable car lines linking the living and the dead.

Another snapshot besides the Gezhouba Dam: a forgotten pool, the dam affirms and negates the passage of time, as kids swim and bathe without care, and not far away, a carcass of a dog floats, alongside the weeds and reeds in this moist summer afternoon.

Private bus conductors drag you on regardless if the destination of yours and theirs coincide or not. Then they dispose you off the highway and drive on.

Chinese ideograms embody an image of the past with all the layered references, in the (misty) air, so to speak, in newspapers and propaganda banners, and hence the material evidence of history is discarded without sentiment lost.

The LCD screen above grounds our experience with flickering lights and sweating bodies chanting: “Let’s go China!” The wind brings forth ashes from fireworks afar, showing not what the cries were for. I’m in Beijing’s Wangfujing shopping plaza, minutes from Tiananmen, invisible amongst the crowds awaiting the 2008 Olympic open ceremony.

After the applause, the master feeds on time their sheltered, and in frenzy, digestion is made, to ensure precise vomit of the self.

And heard faintly the murmur of someone with a flat mechanical tone.

I once walked past a zoo, surrounded by road constructions while visitor numbers zero. The loneliest zoo in the world, I imagine. The one-humped camel came to entice me, but shy I was and declined. Monkeys were fed, so were the wolves. The male lion roared, but who heard? Soon the earth will swallow him too.

Cicadas molt, their shells remain empty on tree barks for us to ponder.

Wayne Liu

Eric Guo, whose real name in Guo Yang, is a young man who came to Beijing from the countryside with the dream of becoming a photographer. I know this because we have corresponded through email with the use of Gogle translator, an amazing web page that translates, more or less, English to Chinesa and vice versa. Guo has photographed the Yi people, an indigenous, ethnic minority that live in the mountains of Sichuan province, using a 2 1/4 camera, and traditional film. Guo has a beautiful sense of black and white, and his images seem to come from another century. His lament, that traditional cultures are being absorbed into “modern life,” is familiar, and its also the reason that photographers often seek out that which is endangered and disappearing, before they fade away into history. Above all the camera provides a record.

Rian Dundon is an American photojournalist from Monterey, California. He is currently enrolled in the Social Documentation M.A. program at University of California, Santa Cruz, and holds a B.F.A. in Photography and Imaging from New York University (2003). Since 2005 Rian has lived and worked predominantly in Mainland China. He speaks Mandarin Chinese and is a dual citizen of Ireland and the United States.

Rian’s work has been featured in TIME, Newsweek, The Irish Times Magazine, Stern, Vision, and Out Magazine. He has exhibited in solo and group shows at the FotoGrafia Festival (Rome), Beijing Photo Spring, The Camera Club of New York, The New York Photo Festival, New York University, and the Angkor Photography Festival. In 2007 Rian received a Tierney Fellowship for his project examining youth culture in interior China. He is a contributor at New America Media and has lectured on his work at New York University and East China Normal University in Shanghai.
http://www.riandundon.com

M Scott Brauer was born 1982, Landstuhl, Germany, to American parents, and is currently based in the American Northwest. Brauer graduated with honors from the University of Washington with dual degrees in philosophy and Russian literature and language in 2005 and worked for daily newspapers in 2006 and 2007: the Northwest Herald in suburban Chicago, and the Flint Journal in Flint, Michigan. Brauer is represented by Invision Images, Aurora Select, On Asia, and Wonderful Machine and his clients include: The New York Times, Fader magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and Time Asia. http://www.mscottbrauer.com

Katharina Hesse holds a graduate degree in Chinese ( & Japanese) studies from the Institut National des Langues et Civilizations Orientales (INALCO) in Paris; she is one of a few foreign photographers who are accredited by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and has lived in China for 17 years.
Hesse initially worked as an assistant for German TV (ZDF) and then freelanced for Newsweek from 1996 to 2002. In 2003 and 2004 she covered China for Getty. Hesse is self-taught in photography and her photos have appeared in publications such as Courrier International, Der Spiegel, D della Repubblica, EYEmazing, Glamour ( Germany),IO Donna ,Le Monde, Marie-Claire,Neon, Newsweek, Reporters without Borders annual book ( Germany),Stern, Vanity Fair (Italy/Germany),Wall Street Journal, Die Zeit etc. http://www.katharinahesse.com

Markel Redondo is a freelance photographer based in Bilbao, Spain. Some of his clients include Greenpeace, Bloomberg, the British Council, Le Figaro Magazine, Le Point, New York Times, South China Morning Post, The Mail on Sunday or Frommer’s Travel Guides. Markel was finalist at “Descubrimientos” Photo Espana 2007, nominated for the Joop Swart Masterclass in 2007, 2009 and 2010 and took the prestigious Eddie Adams Workshop in 2007. After spending two years documenting social issues in China, he is based in Bilbao now, where he works on commisions and projects. http://www.markelredondo.com

Carolyn Drake was born in California, USA in 1971. She studied history and media/culture at Brown University, graduating in 1994, and later learned photography at ICP and Ohio University. Her photo career began at the age of 30, when she decided to leave her multimedia job in New York to learn about the world through personal experience. She currently lives in Istanbul and has been the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Ukraine, a World Press Photo award, the Lange Taylor Prize, and a Santa Fe prize finalist. http://www.carolyndrake.com

Wayne Liu currently resides and eats in Chinatown, NYC, and was born in Taipei, Taiwan in 1979.

Ryan Pyle was born in 1978 in Toronto, Canada and in 2002 realized a life-long dream and moved to China, where he began taking freelance photo assignments, working for the NY Times, Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal and others. http://www.ryanpyle.com

Sergio Ramazzatti has written and photographed hundreds of stories for most of the leading Italian magazines, including D La Repubblica, IoDonna, supplement of the daily Corriere della Sera, Specchio,
supplement of the daily La Stampa, Ventiquattro, supplement of the daily Il Sole-24 Ore. As a novelist, he published ‘Vado verso il capo’ (Feltrinelli 1996), ‘Carne verde’ (Feltrinelli 1999), ‘La birra
di Shaoshan’ (Feltrinelli 2002), ‘Liberi di morire’ (Piemme 2003), ‘Tre ore all’alba’ (DeAgostini 2005) and ‘Afrozapping’ (Feltrinelli 2006). In 2005 he won the Enzo Baldoni Prize for Journalism of
the Province of Milano, and the International Photography Award (Los Angeles) in the ‘Editorial’ category.
www.parallelozero.com

Xiqi Yuwang, was born in 1975, in Zheijang, China. He arrived in Spain in 1990, where he first studied Fashion Design, and afterwards Photography, at Art and Design HighSchool of Valencia. Yuwang grew up at PineHill, in a familiar ambient, among poets and painters. His work will be exhibited in ARCO, the most important Contemporary Art Fair in Spain this year. http://xiqiyuwang.blogspot.com

Guo Yang (Eric Guo) graduated in 2002 from Tsinghua University in Fine Arts, and photographs elements of the past that are being absorbed into so-called modern civilization in China. Guo was born in a poor, mountainous region in Northern China and at aged 18 entered the Hebei Arts and Crafts School. Contact Eric Guo at ericguo06@yahoo.cn .

Holly Wilmeth spent her childhood living between the city and jungles and agricultural plains of Central America. After graduating in Political Science and Languages, she lived in Japan for
two years teaching English in rural communities. In 2003 she returned to the US where she took up photography as a career, but her wanderlust continues to see her visit many remote corners of the world from Mongolia to Mexico, where she is currently based. http://www.hollywilmeth.com

Christian Als is a Danish photographer born in the countryside outside Copenhagen. Most of his work centers on ‘concerned photography’ and he is drawn to social, political and economic issues throughout the world. Als has worked in countries like Gaza, Haiti, Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, China, DR Congo and Kenya. I love to undertake social and humanitarian projects around the world, and his work has been published in publications such as TIME, The New Yorker, The Sunday Times Magazine, GEO, Stern, Der Spiegel, The Wall Street Journal and L’espresso, to name a few. http://www.christianals.com

James Whitlow Delano’s work in Afghanistan was awarded 1st place in the 2008 NPPA Best of Photojournalism competition for Best Picture Story (large markets). He received the Alfred Eisenstaedt (Eisie) Award administered by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and presented by Life Magazine, for work done in China. His photographs have also received the Award of Excellence three times from Communication Arts Photography Annual for work done in China, West Africa and monograph book publishing. James has been cited with awards in the PDN Photography Annual five times. Delano’s 2003 Three Gorges and 2004 Shenzhen, China projects have been cited with Picture of the Year International awards. He lives in Tokyo. http://www.jameswhitlowdelano.com

100Eyes is an online photographic showcase featuring contemporary photography including documentary, art, and alternative photojournalism. Edited and created by Andy Levin, 100Eyes is made possible by the generosity of photographers who donate their work in the spirit of a shared photographic community.

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The American Dream

 

 

Like many American myths, the American Dream was created by a cabal of propagandists.

Hollywood studios, automobile manufacturers, the media of post-war America, and a booming housing industry, among others, all stood to benefit from an unprecedented marketing opportunity in the form of hundreds of thousands of GIs returning from World War II. And so it was born, the American Dream, a house to own, a car in every driveway, two children, and an unlimited future of consumption. Like its sister myth, the Cold War, the American Dream, the words carry such weight that they are captitalized.

This issue of 100Eyes is about words, and the way that images can change our perception of them. Most artists and photographers explore emotional territory. Suffering and joy are as much a commidity as are facts. In the work of the photographers represented in this issue of 100Eyes, we see reflections on the American Dream, on what Americans aspire to be, and on how their aspirations, formulated by the visions of Hollywood, are often transmuted in ways that are not anticipated and that often make us uncomfortable. In Brenda Ann Kenneally’s Upstate Girls and in Daryl Peveto’s American Nomads, we see what some might think are grotesque parodies of “the American Dream.” But to the photographers, and their subjects, this is anything but the case.

In a world of Madoffs what are the outcasts, those less able to survive?

Likewise, in the photographs of Caleb Cole,
who dresses up in second hand clothes and photographs himself in elaborate recreations of the lives of their sometimes imaginary owners, there is both pathos and the narcissism of fantasy, of escapism that has always been part of the dream.

Photographs, of course, sometimes do not speak for themselves, and often the headlines, captions, and artistic statements that proport to elucidate are nothing more than sideshow mirrors themselves, shifting in appearance as images are projected over them.
Such is the case with the American Dream, words which have a entirely different meaning than when filtered by Mustafah Abdulaziz’s hopeful images of the Obama inauguration images, than when viewing Daryl Peveto’s essay, “American Nomads.”

Andy Levin
New Orleans

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Beware the Cost of War

 

“To an Israeli Jew, a photograph of a child torn apart in the attack on the Sbarro pizzeria in downtown Jerusalem is first of all a photograph of a Jewish child killed by a Palestinian suicide-bomber. To the Palestinian, a photograph of a child torn apart by a tank round in Gaza is first of all a photograph of a Palestinian child killed by Israeli ordnance. To the militant, identity is everything and all images wait to be explained and falsified by their captions”
Susan Sontag

First I must warn you that this exhibition includes some “graphic images”. These are images that were not composed to conceal the results of violence. I urge you not to recoil and ask you to study these images. Try to conjure them up whenever you see a newspaper headline reporting deaths or injuries. Even if it is demoted to the back pages because too small a number of people were affected, or happened too far away.

What has been concealed in this essay are the captions. They are located every dozen or so images. This is to challenge you to face the horrible reality of conflict without immediately consulting the caption to make sure it was the other side that was the perpetrator. Alongside the images appear testimonies gathered from Israeli and Palestinian survivors, which chain the images to the context of loss.

These images are mostly used to illustrate, to make a point. To show “what they did”.
They are presented as extreme and demonic instances of cruelty. Is it possible that the fault lies not just in the unreasonable behaviour of any side but in conflict itself?

The photographers in this exhibition are some of the best in the world.
Uriel Sinai and Amit Shabi have been awarded in the World Press photography competition, Jafar Ishtyeh and Mahmud Hams have won the Prix Bayeux war photography prize and all of the other photographers have received various awards and accolades.

This exhibition would not have been possible without their generosity and their help in suggesting and recruiting the other photographers – even ones from “the other side.”

Yoav Galai

Exhibit Informtion

73 Leonard Street
London
EC2A 4QS

11-7pm October 23rd-29th

Panel discussion chaired by Jon Snow featuring Uriel Sinai, Yoav Galai, Abid Katib and Jafar Ishtayeh on Monday, October 26th, registration at info@bewarethecostofwar.org