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natalieorourkephotography · 4 years ago

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Photojournalism Report

Where does news come from?

- Papers

- News Outlets

- Social Media

- Television

- Magazines

Five sources of good photojournalism

BBC News

The Guardian

Sky News

Photographer unknown: https://news.sky.com/story/afghanistan-bombing-at-least-18-killed-including-teenagers-in-suicide-blast-at-kabul-education-centre-12113737

Life Magazine

British Journal of Photography

Two Magnum Photographers

Alec Soth

Soth’s work is documentary style. He became a nominee for Magnum in 2004 and became a member in 2008. He mainly documents Americans in suburban areas and makes sure his images are full of colour. He says most of his best work comes after failure. Every project he has done is because of an internal need and has come out of a place that he has been at that particular point in his like. “Sleeping by the Mississippi.” came from a desire to break free and “Niagara” came from wanting to explore love and long term relationships. All of Soth’s projects are personal to him and hr very successfully tells a story through each project whether it be love or breaking free. Soth also came to photography from a fine art perspective and this can be seen from the simplicity of the work. He also shoots 8x10 and really takes his time in composing and taking his images. There is no path to being an artist... chart your own path. Deal with patience.

Jérôme Sessini

Sessini is a very well known war photographer and has been sent to war zones in Syria and Palestine. As well as this, he has also documented drug violence in Mexico and protests in Ukraine. I try to make people aware about stories and conflicts. A lot of Sessini’s work is showcasing harsh realities of living in dangerous places and war zones. He started off photographing protests in Paris before “Gamma” sent him to Albania to shoot the Kosovo war. ...and I have my own political opinions. But I try to keep this away from photography. I don't try to give explanations with my work because photography cannot tell everything...I want to make people to form their ideas for themselves. I feel Sessini’s work is successful due to the rawness and honesty in his images. He doesn't try to make things look better or worse, he simply wants us to see the truth of the world we live in. He puts his life in danger to show us these truths.

©Jérôme Sessini

Information Sources:

https://www.magnumphotos.com/photographer/alec-soth/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-1JrQLAgkI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIkG9OcHcCk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uN8dSbKjkXY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCA7z7_Y7Rc

https://www.canon-europe.com/pro/stories/jerome-sessini-finding-your-voice/

https://www.magnumphotos.com/photographer/jerome-sessini/

#hnd2photography #photography #contextual

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sixteensaltines · 4 years ago

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Duro Olowu - Seeing

Edited by Naomi Beckwith Prestel, Munich 2020,416 pages, 353 color illustrations, ISBN 9783791359489euro 45,00email if you want to buy: [email protected] world leader Duro Olowu applies his creative process and cosmopolitan eye to a major exhibition drawn from Chicago’s great art collections. Nigerian-born British fashion designer Duro Olowu is internationally renowned for his womenswear label launched in 2004 that speaks to a cosmopolitan sensibility informed by his international background and a confident eye for visual disciplines from art to film to popular culture. Olowu’s global viewpoint has translated into wildly popular platforms and projects from Instagram postings to revelatory curatorial projects in London and New York that position him at the transcultural crossroads of art, culture, and fashion. Now Olowu turns his gimlet eye on Chicago to curate a show drawn from that metropolis’s public and private art collections, anchored by the MCA’s holdings. Published on the occasion of Olowu’s largest curatorial project, Duro Olowu: Seeing elucidates the designer-cum-curator’s creative process as he imagines relationships between artists and objects across time, media, and geography: Naomi Beckwith illuminates Olowu’s curatorial process, driven by a voracious appetite for contemporary art and culture brought together in sharp juxtapositions; Valerie Steele situates Olowu’s designs within the contemporary fashion world; Ekow Eshun focuses on Olowu’s role within Britain’s black and Afro-Caribbean creative community; Thelma Golden interviews Olowu about his work as designer, curator, and chronicler of culture and style across the worlds of museums and fashion; and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye creates new fiction for this volume.

via https://fashionbooksmilano.tumblr.com/post/620305532431007744/duro-olowu-seeing-edited-by-naomi-beckwith

#book #fashion #magazine #graphic #font

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fashionbooksmilano · 4 years ago

Photo

Duro Olowu Seeing

edited by Naomi Beckwith

Prestel, Munich 2020,416 pages, 353 color illustrations, ISBN 9783791359489

euro 45,00

email if you want to buy: [email protected]

Fashion world leader Duro Olowu applies his creative process and cosmopolitan eye to a major exhibition drawn from Chicago's great art collections. Nigerian-born British fashion designer Duro Olowu is internationally renowned for his womenswear label launched in 2004 that speaks to a cosmopolitan sensibility informed by his international background and a confident eye for visual disciplines from art to film to popular culture. Olowu's global viewpoint has translated into wildly popular platforms and projects from Instagram postings to revelatory curatorial projects in London and New York that position him at the transcultural crossroads of art, culture, and fashion. Now Olowu turns his gimlet eye on Chicago to curate a show drawn from that metropolis's public and private art collections, anchored by the MCA's holdings. Published on the occasion of Olowu's largest curatorial project, Duro Olowu: Seeing elucidates the designer-cum-curator's creative process as he imagines relationships between artists and objects across time, media, and geography: Naomi Beckwith illuminates Olowu's curatorial process, driven by a voracious appetite for contemporary art and culture brought together in sharp juxtapositions; Valerie Steele situates Olowu's designs within the contemporary fashion world; Ekow Eshun focuses on Olowu's role within Britain's black and Afro-Caribbean creative community; Thelma Golden interviews Olowu about his work as designer, curator, and chronicler of culture and style across the worlds of museums and fashion; and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye creates new fiction for this volume.

07/06/20

orders to: [email protected]

ordini a: [email protected]

twitter:@fashionbooksmi

instagram: fashionbooksmilano, designbooksmilano tumblr: fashionbooksmilano, designbooksmilano

#Duro Olowu #womenswear label #fashion exhibition catalogue #British fashion designer #Nigerian born #Valerie Steele #fashion books #fashionbooksmilano

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futuresofcolour · 7 years ago

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Afrofuturism and the Funkification of the Cyborg

by Farah Yusuf

Electronic music technology creates a world of virtual sound, a realm of sonic simulacra detached from any specific moment or site. Electronic instruments were embraced by black musical subcultures from jazz to techno, and, as musicians of the African diaspora began to explore the abstract possibilities of the electronic signal, tropes of space aliens and science fiction accompanied these synthetic, simulated musics. The “African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future” is defined broadly across cultural genres as Afrofuturism.[1] Specific to music, cultural critic Kodwo Eshun describes “AfroDiasporic futurism” as a digital diaspora of “computer rhythms, machine mythology and conceptechnics which routes and reroutes and criss-crosses the Black Atlantic.” Afrofuturism realized through electronic music activates a sense of agency through embodied communication of codes.

Afrofuturism is a techno-visionary tradition that negotiates a zone between modern technology, African roots, and prophetic imagination. The drum was the original African communication technology and, since their arrival on Western shores, black musicians have proved adept at mastering and re-purposing Western instruments and technologies. Jazz virtuosos Sun Ra and Herbie Hancock were among the first to use a synthesizer in popular music production, liberating it from the domain of white intellectual avant-garde musicians. After years of playing with Miles Davis’ during his electric period, Hancock released the album Sextant (1973) where he used the synthesizer to its full potential, creating and sequencing futuristic space sounds with no earthly instrumental referent. By the mid 1980’s this trajectory would culminate in techno music – a studio music of synthesized sounds; a music where “young black musicians use computer technology to construct a soundtrack to the end of the industrial epoch.”[3] Juan Atkins named the genre ‘techno’ after the term ‘techno-rebels’ described by Alvin Toffler in the book Future Shock (1970). Techno-rebels are a group who master technology yet refuse to let it separate them from their past roots or essential humanity. Afronauts, like techno-rebels, re-mix of those past roots with future technology.

More than just technical mastery, their music is visionary, giving sonic form to feelings of alienation and reclamation. Music theorist Jacques Attali writes:

Music is prophecy: its styles and economic organization are ahead of the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code. It makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible. [4]

The cosmic sounds spawned further cultural codings of futuristic imagery and dress. The album cover for Sextant pictorially connects space travel to a primitive African past. Herbie Hancock is shown flying a spaceship in his subsequent album Thrust (1974), and on Headhunters (1975) he becomes an alien playing a synthesizer. Sun Ra weaves an elaborate myth around his Arkestra’s extraterrestrial origin, and George Clinton received the Funk from an alien race. Platform shoes are for walking on the moon, and techno is described by one of its progenitors, Juan Atkins, as music that sounds like a “UFO landed on top of the track.” [5]

Why science fiction and space aliens? As Donna Haraway so aptly declares, “the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.” [6] African diasporic peoples were the first aliens, displaced through slavery in the seventeenth century. Black existence and science fiction are one and the same. Both exemplify the profound experience of cultural dislocation, alienation, and estrangement. Still, the question remains:

Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures? Furthermore, don’t the technocrats, SF writers, futurologists, set designers, and streamliners—white to a man—who have engineered our collective fantasies already have a lock on that unreal estate?[7]

This question posed by Mark Déry echoes Spivak’s theory of the subaltern, which informs so much of post-colonial discourse. But, the Afrofuturist alien is like Haraway’s Cyborg in its “power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other.” [8] Like the Cyborg, it’s power stems from its technologically inspired reconstruction as pure information, or dis-information according to Kodwo Eshun:

Alien continuum operates not through continuities, retentions, genealogies or inheritances but rather through intervals gaps and breaks. It turns away from its roots; it opposes common sense with the force of the fictional and the power of falsity. […] The alien discontinuum is the rejection of any and all notions of a compulsory black condition. [9]

These metaphorical tropes provide alternative and empowering narratives of creative self-determination. However, the Afrofuturist transcends the Cyborg when the narratives are encoded through embodied communication.

Music is the medium through which these imaginative forms get inscribed on the social body. The term ‘funk’ resides at the heart of all Afrofuturist genres of music. Funk is derived from an African word meaning “positive sweat” and is indicative of an African aesthetic of “communally impassioned engagement” to music. [10] Sweat also plays a major role in the evolution from Cyborg to the embodied Posthuman. The cybernetic theory of information, control, and communication rests on an analogy of homeostasis, which is an organism’s ability to regulate its temperature through sweat. [11] In the posthuman view the informational pattern of knowledge arises as an “epiphenomenon corresponding to the phenomenal base the body provides.” [12] The music of Afrofuturism is a kind of re-enchantment of the body – “fluidarirty maintained and exacerbated by soundmachines” [13] – politics enacted on the dance floor and culture encoded in the body.

Afrofuturists are revolutionary. They proclaim a powerful message by carving out a unique and hybrid space, alternative to a historical black tradition or postcolonial diasporic condition, where black identity is empowered by science fiction and electronic technology. As innovators of their craft, they musically demonstrate the ability to achieve this remote possibility. The true subversion of Afrofuturism is the dissemination of its technologically empowered message through mediums that are traditionally the domain of the white man.

=Farah Yusuf

1. Mark Déry, “Black to the Future,” in Flame Wars: the Discourse of Cyberculture (Duke University Press, 1994), 179-222.

2. Kodwo Eshun, “Operating System for the Redesign of Sonic Reality” in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music eds. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004), 157.

3. The Last Angel of History, VHS, Directed by John Akomfrah (Icarus Films, 1996)

4. Jacques Attali, Noise: the Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 11.

5. The Last Angel of History.

6. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149.

7. Déry.

8. Haraway, 175.

9. Eshun, 158.

10. Richard Shusterman, “Form and Funk” in Aesthetics: A Reader in the Philosophy of the Arts, 2nd Edition eds. David Goldblatt, Lee B. Brown. (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2005), 387-388.

11. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (University of Chicago Press, 1999), 8.

12. Hayles, 203.

13. Eshun, 158.

#afrofuturism #farah yusuf #futures of colour #links

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