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Part Four Scanning for Information |
note also, photofinish a close finish in a horse race, photogenic, to describe someone who looks good in a photograph |
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PART 4: Photography and PhotographersAnswer these questions with reference to the passages which follow. Who ... took unusual still-life photographs? 01. ................ ... trained as a teacher? 02. ............... ... worked as a journalist? 03. ................ 04. ............... ... used photography as an aid? 05. ................ 06. ............... ... took carefully composed pictures? 07. ................ 08. ............... ... was interested in outsiders? 09. ................ 10. ............... ... followed his own advice too closely? 11. ............... .. was torn between painting and photography? 12. .............. .. was a serious social reformer? 13. .............. .. won prizes? 14. .............. ... made his photographs socio-political? 15. .............. 16. .............. ... was fashionable? 17. ..............
PHOTOGRAPHERS A. Lewis W Hine was the outstanding exponent of social documentary photography in America. He dabbled in various fields before enrolling at the University of Chicago and then in New York where at Columbia University he studied social work. Hine began to take photographs in 1904. He realised that the camera was an important instrument, both for his investigations as well as for the evaluation of the finds of those investigations. After concluding his pedagogical studies in 1905, he taught at a photographic club, which he also managed. Working for the National Child Labour Committee, he photographed children working in coal mines and factories throughout the USA, and his photographs were used in a campaign against child labour. During further travels throughout the USA, Hine documented the social conditions of children, and he also gave lectures on behalf of the National Child Labour Committee. In 1918 Hine joined the Red Cross, which despatched him to France. From there, he travelled to Italy and Greece. Returning to New York, he changed his emphasis from an objective, clear documentation without emotion to a more interpretative style of photography. With his photographs of workers he sought to demonstrate that it was not the machine but man who created affluence. In 1930, he was given the job of documenting the gigantic construction project of the Empire State Building. The resulting photographs, which Hine regarded as "industrial interpretation", are probably the most famous of his images. B. Florence Henri, born in New York, was a trend-setting photographer of the twenties and thirties. She studied painting in Berlin and Munich and then in Paris. She was then a student at the Bauhaus where she began to take an interest in photography, and began experimenting with the possibilities of the medium, such as unconventional perspectives, multiple exposures and montages. By the time she returned to Paris in 1929, her work had already been exhibited and she had gained broad recognition. Photography caused her painting to recede more and more into the background. She began to specialise in portraiture. Her models were mostly celebrities from the artistic and intellectual circles of Paris. Another important category in her work consists of dense arrangements of fruit, plates, reels of thread, perfume bottles or purely geometric objects that were thought out to the last detail. By the use of mirrors she succeeded in upsetting the familiar central perspective spatial arrangement of photography. In this, Florence Henri reverted to the cubist form elements of her early abstract paintings. After she retired in 1963 to a small village in Picardy, she gave up photography altogether and devoted herself entirely to her original vocation of abstract painting. C. Kyoichi Sawada became known as a press photographer who worked for United Press International during the Vietnam War. Sawada's interest in photography began early in life. At the age of 20 he became a newspaper editor in Tokyo. In 1965 he had himself transferred to Vietnam in order to experience the reality of war with his own eyes. He received several international awards, such as the Pulitzer Prize in 1966 for his picture Flight to Freedom. The human drama of grief and terror, expressed by the distorted faces of the four children and their mother who were able to flee an attack on their village by swimming for their lives, tells of the reality of the Vietnam War. Sawada's pictures document the suffering of civilians under the rule of soldiers, as well as wounding and pain on both sides. Sawada risked his life many times on his assignments to isolated theatres of war. He was killed while on a photographic assignment to Cambodia in 1970. D. Ed van der Elsken completed his art studies in Amsterdam before moving to Paris to work as freelance photographer. He also became a correspondent for a Dutch newspaper. Many of this politically active photographer's socio-critical pictures and films were made during a trip round the world. At first he worked only in black and white, taking up colour alter on. In a photographic series about jazz, he did not use flash illumination because he considered it important to preserve the atmosphere and the emotions of the moment in natural light conditions. Elsken published numerous photographic books about Amsterdam, Japan and China. He expressed the drama of social injustice in a pictorially concentrated manner with photographs of China and South Africa. He expressed his interest in people on the margins of society, who are never shown in representative reports about a country. E. David Octavius Hill, a pioneer of photography born in Scotland, who entered history as one of the most important early portrait photographers, was actually a landscape painter and lithographer. He resorted to photography only as an aid for executing an unusual assignment he was given in 1843. He was commissioned to paint a group portrait of the 457 men and women who participated in the founding convention of the Free Church of Scotland in Edinburgh. At the suggestion of a friend, Hill decided first to photograph all the delegates individually, and then to use the resulting picture as guides for rendering their facial features correctly in the painting of the group. He was fortunate in securing the cooperation of a competent photographer, Robert Adamson, who had opened a photographic studio in Edinburgh. The two men did not concentrate exclusively on the facial features, but created elaborate and well-composed portraits in the style of painted portraits of the times. Some are reminiscent of Dutch painting of the 17th century. Nearly all the portraits were made outdoors, with exposure times of several minutes. Hill and Adamson worked as a team. Hill was regarded as the project leader and as the one who set the artistic tone. Yet Adamson's role appears to have been greater than that of a mere craftsman. Be that as it may, Hill gave up his photographic activities for a time when Adamson died prematurely in 1848. Photographs that Hill made later with a new partner did not reach the quality of earlier photographs made with Adamson's creative input. F. Robert Capa, born in Budapest in 1913, studied political science in Berlin, and then taught himself photography. In 1933 he emigrated to Paris, where he began working as a freelance photographer. His photographs of the Spanish Civil War won him a reputation in Paris, particularly his picture entitled Death of a Spanish Loyalist. From then on he concentrated on being a photographic war correspondent. His motto was, "If your picturers aren't good enough, you're not close enough." His talent for sharply conveying the feelings and suffering of people in civil wars or rebellions in single pictures earned him great admiration. He travelled to China and Israel. In 1954 he was fatally injured in Tai-Binh, Vietnam. The quality of Capa's pictures lies in the fine line they portray between the will to live and the urge to self-destruction. ©English Teaching Systems February 2005 |
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