Word: photograph
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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There had been earlier efforts to photograph the conditions of the poor but none so stark or so widely seen. Riis' unflinching pictures of tenement life mark a turning point between the Victorian idea that poverty was an evil to be condemned and the reformer's conviction that it was a condition to be remedied. Riis, like Mathew Brady, had a team of photographers (and like Brady, took credit for their work). Shooting in gloomy alleys and sunless rooming houses, he and his colleagues became pioneers of flash-lit photography -- a delicate undertaking in those days when the newly invented...
Later Hine worked for nearly a decade taking pictures of child laborers, sometimes gulling suspicious mill owners into thinking he was there to photograph their machinery, all the while keeping one hand in his pocket for clandestine note taking. He saw his pictures as evidence, "photographic proof" that would move public opinion to demand laws to remove children from factories. His data would be the grime written upon their young faces; his evidence would be the weariness in their eyes...
Balzac had a "vague dread" of being photographed. Like some primitive peoples, he thought the camera steals something of the soul -- that, as he told a friend "every body in its natural state is made up of a series of ghostly images superimposed in layers to infinity, wrapped in infinitesimal films." Each time a photograph was made, he believed, another thin layer of the subject's being would be stripped off to become not life as before but a membrane of memory in a sort of translucent antiworld...
...time even registered ivory reaches Japan, the link with Africa is all but lost. On the wall of the Fuso Trading Co. in downtown Tokyo is a photograph of a lone elephant standing in silhouette against a red sunset. "We don't know exactly what country the ivory originated from, very sorry," says company accountant Miyako Yoshida. Last year the company imported 4.5 tons of ivory from Singapore, of which 2.5 tons went for making piano keys. Once Yoshida and a customer saw a film in which an elephant was shot. She said they covered their eyes in horror...
...Cover: Photograph by Bruce Plotkin