In collaboration with Kodak and George Eastman House, this week celebrates the history of photography, its contribution to and relationship with surrounding culture, its place in the art world, and its reflection of technological innovations that have reshaped the industry. We meet photographers practicing their craft, and SEE this nexus of art, science, culture, biography, and history.
Bio
Ed Kashi
Ed Kashi is a photojournalist dedicated to documenting the social and political issues that define our times. Along with numerous awards, including honors from Pictures of the Year International, World Press Foundation, Communication Arts and American Photography, Kashi's images have been published and exhibited worldwide, and his editorial assignments and personal projects have generated six books.
Kashi's latest book is Three, a June 2009 project presented in a triptych format that draws upon his vast supply of images created over 20 years searching for "visual connections, visual language, visual poetry of three." Kashi has shot many National Geographic cover stories, including June 2009's "The Christian Exodus from the Holy Land," which featured his intimate photographs focused on the plight of today's Arab Christians.
Another of Kashi's innovative approaches to photography and filmmaking produced the "Iraqi Kurdistan Flipbook," which premiered on MSNBC.com in December 2006. Using stills in a moving image format, this creative and thought-provoking form of visual storytelling has been shown in many film festivals and as part of a series of exhibitions on the Iraq War at the George Eastman House. Also, an eight-year personal project completed in 2003, Aging in America: The Years Ahead, created a traveling exhibition, an award-winning documentary film, a website and a book which was named one of the best photo books of 2003 by American Photo.
Kashi has done documentary work on the Protestant community in Northern Ireland, self-published in a book titled The Protestants: No Surrender. In the mid-1990s, he spent several years documenting the lives of Jewish settlers in the West Bank; a photograph from this essay received an award in the World Press Photo 1995 contest.
In 2002, Kashi and his wife, writer and filmmaker Julie Winokur, founded Talking Eyes Media. The non-profit company has produced numerous short films and multimedia pieces that explore significant social issues.
Method of recording permanent images by the action of light projected by a lens in a camera onto a film or other light-sensitive material. It was developed in the 19th century through the artistic aspirations of two Frenchmen, Nicéphore Niepce and Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, whose combined discoveries led to the invention of the first commercially successful process, the daguerreotype (1837). In addition, two Englishmen, Thomas Wedgwood and William Henry Fox Talbot, patented the negative-positive calotype process (1839) that became the forerunner of modern photographic technique. Photography was initially used for portraiture and landscapes. In the 1850s and '60s, Mathew B. Brady and Roger Fenton pioneered war photography and photojournalism. From its inception, two views of photography predominated: one approach held that the camera and its resulting images truthfully document the real world, while the other considered the camera simply to be a tool, much like a paintbrush, with which to create artistic statements. The latter notion, known as Pictorialism, held sway from the late 1860s through the first decade of the 20th century, as photographers manipulated their negatives and prints to create hazy, elaborately staged images that resembled paintings. By the 1920s and '30s, a new, more realistic style of photography gained prominence, as photographers such as Paul Strand, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams began to pursue sharply focused, detailed images. The Great Depression and two world wars inspired many photographers, including Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, to pursue documentary, often socially conscious photography. Inspired by such work, many photojournalists, including Alfred Eisenstaedt and Margaret Bourke-White, also emerged during this period. In the second half of the 20th century, the urban social scene became a subject of much interest to photographers, as did celebrity portraiture and fashion photography. At the turn of the 21st century, photographers took advantage of digital capabilities by experimenting with enormous formats and new manipulative techniques. As technological advances improve photographic equipment, materials, and techniques, the scope of photography continues to expand enormously. See alsodigital camera.
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