Pictures of the Week: March 16, 2012

More excellent photo-journalism from The Denver Post

“Children watch the wax figure of Anne Frank and their hideout reconstruction at Madame Tussauds on March 9, 2012 in Berlin, Germany.

Former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich reaches over a railing to shake supporters’ hands after his scheduled address to reporters Wednesday, March 14, 2012, in Chicago. The 55-year-old Democrat is due to report to a prison in Colorado on Thursday to begin serving a 14-year sentence, making him the second Illinois governor in a row to go to prison for corruption.

A girl lights candles in front of a temporary shopping complex in the earthquake and tsunami-devastated city of Kesennuma, Iwate prefecture, northeastern Japan, Sunday, March 11 2012, to mark the first anniversary of the massive disaster that devastated Japan’s northeast one year ago.”

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Children watch the wax figure of Anne Frank and their hideout reconstruction at Madame Tussauds on March 9, 2012 in Berlin, Germany. (Photo by Andreas Rentz/Getty Images) #

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Ultra Orthodox Jews attend the funeral of Rabbi Moshe Yehoshua Hager, leader of the hassidic sect Vizhnitz in Israel, in Bnei Brak , Ultra Orthodox Jewish town near Tel Aviv, Israel, Wednesday, March 14, 2012. Rabbi Moshe Yehoshua Hager was 95.(AP Photo/Oded Balilty) #

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A Kalahari Bush woman dances in her traditional hut on February 18, 2012 in Molapo, in the centre of the Kalahari Game Reserve. After winning a long court battle with Botswana’s government, new water wells mean the Bushmen of the Kalahari can now return to their ancestral lands — but with many already adopting the ways of modernity, their legendary desert civilisation may be a thing of the past. AFP PHOTO / STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN #

4 Palestinians inspect a fire at a building on March 14, 2012, after an Israeli air strike on Gaza City. Israel and militants in Gaza began observing an Egyptian-brokered truce on March 13, after four days of violence, which officials on both sides warned could flare up again. AFP PHOTO/MOHAMMED ABED #

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Margaret Bourke-White

Bourke-White was a first in many things and had a knack of being in the right place at the right time. Born in 1904 and working as the first woman photojournalist she photographed the depression era dust bowl along with Dorotea Lange and then became a war correspondent photographing in many of the main theatres of war. She continued working as a journalist as well as a commercial photographer making memorable images in Russia and also made the last photograph of Gandhi, this section from wikipedia gives an insight into her extensive work during the Second World War

“Bourke-White was the first female war correspondent^[4] and the first woman to be allowed to work in combat zones during World War II. In 1941, she traveled to the Soviet Union just as Germany broke its pact of non-aggression. She was the only foreign photographer in Moscow when German forces invaded. Taking refuge in the U.S. Embassy, she then captured the ensuing firestorms on camera.

As the war progressed, she was attached to the U.S. Army Air Force in North Africa, then to the U.S. Army in Italy and later Germany. She repeatedly came under fire in Italy in areas of fierce fighting.

“The woman who had been torpedoed in the Mediterranean, strafed by the Luftwaffe, stranded on an Arctic island, bombarded in Moscow, and pulled out of the Chesapeake when her chopper crashed, was known to the Life staff as ‘Maggie the Indestructible.'”^[5] This incident in the Mediterranean refers to the sinking of the England-Africa bound British troopship SS Strathallan which she recorded in an article “Women in Lifeboats”, in Life, February 22, 1943.

In the spring of 1945, she traveled through a collapsing Germany with General George S. Patton. She arrived at Buchenwald, the notorious concentration camp, and later said, “Using a camera was almost a relief. It interposed a slight barrier between myself and the horror in front of me.” After the war, she produced a book titled Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly, a project that helped her come to grips with the brutality she had witnessed during and after the war.

“To many who got in the way of a Bourke-White photograph — and that included not just bureaucrats and functionaries but professional colleagues like assistants, reporters, and other photographers — she was regarded as imperious, calculating, and insensitive.”^[5]

She had a knack for being at the right place at the right time: She interviewed and photographed Mohandas K. Gandhi just a few hours before his assassination. Alfred Eisenstaedt, her friend and colleague, said one of her strengths was that there was no assignment and no picture that was unimportant to her. She also started the first photo lab at Life.^“

New photographic portrait of The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh

A new portrait photograph of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, the first to be commissioned of the two together, has been released by the National Portrait Gallery in London, as part of an exhibition to mark next year’s Diamond Jubilee called The Queen: Art and Image.the exhibition information is

National Portrait Gallery

17 May – 21 October 2012

Porter Gallery

 

Queen Elizabeth II
by Dorothy Wilding, hand-coloured by Beatrice Johnson
1952
NPG x125105

Touring

• National Gallery Complex, Edinburgh
  25 June–18 September 2011 
• National Museums Northern Ireland
  14 October 2011–15 January 2012 
• National Museum Cardiff
  4 February – 29 April 2012

The new portrait by Thomas Struth can be seen on the BBC website and there is a recording of Struth talking about the image

Thomas Struth (born 1954) is a German photographer whose wide-ranging work includes depictions of detailed cityscapes, Asian jungles and family portraits. He is one of Germany’s most widely exhibited and collected fine art photographers. Struth currently lives and works in Berlin…more about Struth

If you want to see more of Struth’s work here is a link to his website