Tag: criticism

Camera as social reform tool

By on January 2, 2019in Clickable

Wisconsin-born photographer Lewis Wickes Hine used his talent for the common good. Also a sociologist, Hine employed documentary photography in the early 20th Century to track companies that used child labor. As a staff photographer for the National Child Labor Committee, Hine was an activist for this important social issue and soon became an enemy to factory foremen across the United States. At Hyperallergic, Allison Meier’s piece on a new book from Taschen puts Hine’s work as a child labor documentarian (as well as his other photography) in perspective. From Meier:

Born in 1874 in the small town of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, Hine was one of the earliest photographers to use the camera as a tool of social reform (following in the recently trod footsteps of Jacob Riis, who documented the New York City slums). After his father died suddenly in 1890, Hine became the main earner for his family. His work included a stint of six-day weeks at an upholstery factory. He later studied sociology and got a job as an educator at the Felix Adler Ethical Culture School in New York, where he learned to use a camera. (And he got skilled at talking to children, something vital to his covert factory missions.) With NCLC he turned his photographs into slideshow presentations, posters, fliers, and exhibitions (with informative text panels like one from 1914 that compared the “normal child” to the “mill child,” whose eyes were ringed with dark circles that gaped from under a tattered cap).

Read Meier’s whole piece at Hyperallergic, and see more about Lewis W. Hine. America at Work at Taschen’s site.

Earlier in 2018, in my Hyperallergic piece on a new comic about prolific photographer Arthur “Weegee” Fellig, I cited the work of University of Delaware professor Jason E. Hill and his Artist as Reporter: Weegee, Ad Reinhardt, and the PM News Picture. See my separate post on his new book, in which Hill explores the 1940s-era illustration- and photography-based newspaper PM. Even as Hine had passed away in the year that PM launched, Hill writes that his reform photography was critical to the origins of the New York City tabloid and the brand of journalism practiced by its contributors. See more on Artist as Reporter.

 

Pierre on Plath

By on December 17, 2018in Clickable

Cartoonist Summer Pierre reviews for The New Yorker‘s site two collections of letters from poet and novelist Sylvia Plath, who suffered from depression and took her own life in 1963. For her drawn consideration of the books, Pierre works in color, sharing context and her reaction to Plath’s letters by way of a long scrolling column of single panels organized vertically. The focus swings between the artist-as-critic in her Hudson Valley area home—digesting these volumes that have her both spellbound and heartbroken—and renderings of Plath, frequently at the typewriter, preparing what is “over fifteen hundred letters” she sent to her mother, her brother, and others. Read “Sylvia Plath’s Last Plan” here.

Also this month, Pierre spoke about her process and the making of All the Sad Songs, her new graphic memoir, in detail with Gil Roth on his Virtual Memories Show podcast.

I wrote about Pierre’s ongoing autobiographical Paper Pencil Life comics/zine series as well as her brand new graphic memoir All the Sad Songs. It’s great to see her A) working in color and B) doing long(er)-form stuff. Her books and art are available at her Etsy store.

Catastrophe within catastrophe

By on September 5, 2018in Watchlist

j hoberman night living dead romero metrograph

At The New York Review of Books, critic J. Hoberman writes about Night of the Living Dead and its “apocalyptic vision of societal collapse.” The film, based on an in-process script and shot in black and white due to budgetary constraints, earned millions upon its release in 1968. From J. Hoberman:

As the marauding ghouls provide a grimly hilarious cross-section of ordinary Americans, so Night of the Living Dead offered the most literal possible image of the nation devouring itself, as it brought the Vietnam War home, importing the destructive violence of Watts, Newark, and Detroit to bucolic Middle America. Not for nothing is one dazed character, traumatized by the attack of a cannibal ghoul in an American flag-bedecked cemetery, forever mumbling, “What’s happening?” It was the question of the hour.

Read J. Hoberman’s piece, and see Night of the Living Dead on the big screen at Metrograph in NYC.

Image © 2017 Sean Phillips. Buy his poster at Criterion.