Wildfires: an astonishing photograph of survivors in an age of catastrophe

Tim Holmes (not pictured) and his wife Tammy (second from left) huddled under a jetty for three hours with their grandchildren while their hometown in Tasmania was destroyed by wildfires. Photograph: Tim Holmes/AP

Jonathan Jones writes in The Guardian

The old newspaper saying that a good picture is worth a thousand words has rarely been proved more dramatically than it was when grandfather Tim Holmes took his family to shelter in the sea while fire consumed their Tasmania community – and remembered to bring along a camera

2013 has barely begun but this photograph of Holmes’s wife and their grandchildren sheltering from the wildfires in sea water under a jetty will surely be remembered 12 months from now as one of the year’s defining news images

READ MORE HERE

Photography is the art of our time

The old masters painted the drama of life and death. Today photography captures the human condition – better than any other artistic medium of our age

Jonathan Jones writes in the Guardian It has taken me a long time to see this, and you can laugh at me if you like. But here goes.

Photography is the serious art of our time. It also happens to be the most accessible and democratic way of making art that has ever been invented. But first, let’s define photography.

A photograph is an image captured on film, paper or – most commonly now – in digital memory. Photography also includes moving images captured on film or video. Moving or still, we all know a photograph is not a pure record of the visual world: it can be edited and transformed in infinite ways

OK you might agree or want to shout at the page but here is the rest of the article, I think it is worth reading

Photography is the successor to the great art of the past … an English lesson in Pakistan Photograph: Muhammed Muheisen/AP

The naked and the dead: Nadav Kander’s nudes

Nadev Kander is one of my favourite photographers. His work is so diverse but never dull.

Jonathan Jones in the Guardian says “Nudity never loses its power to shock, and Nadav Kander’s latest images are no exception. The acclaimed photographer talks sex, death and airbrushing”

See more pictures here

New Photographers Gallery at the V & A

On 24 October 2011, the V&A’s new Photographs Gallery will open to the public. The gallery will have an inaugural  display of works by key figures of photographic history including Victorian portraits by Julia Margaret Cameron and significant works by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Man Ray, Afred Stieglitz, Diane Arbus and Irving Penn.

The Photographs Gallery will draw upon the  V&A’s internationally renowned collection of photographs, and will chronicle the history of photography from 1839 up to the 1960s. In 1858, the V&A became the first museum to exhibit photographs, and the new Photographs Gallery is able to showcase some of the most technically brilliant and artistically accomplished photographs in its collection. Temporary displays, primarily showcasing contemporary photography, will be shown in the V&A’s existing photographs gallery.

more on this article here

there is also an interesting article in The Guardian by Jonathan Jones

“Photography is a mechanical art. The photographer points a lens at an object, records the image on a plate or film or, today, in digital memory. Therefore all photographs should be similar, the hands of individual photographers unrecognisable. Yet the new Photographs Gallery at the V&A, which opened on Monday to showcase the world’s oldest museum collection of photographs, reveals the apparently limitless variety of the art and the utterly personal genius of great photographers.

A photograph of a steam train taken by Alfred Stieglitz in 1902 hangs near Henri Cartier-Bresson‘s 1932 picture Behind Gare St Lazare, Paris, on the blue-painted wall of the long, elegantly restored, Victorian gallery.” ....more of this here

Isambard Kingdom Brunel and the Launching Chains of ‘The Great Eastern’

Robert Howlett (1830-58), ‘Isambard Kingdom Brunel and the Launching Chains of ‘The Great Eastern”, 1857. Museum no. PH.246-1979

Roslyn Chapel

Roger Fenton (1819-69), ‘Roslyn Chapel’, 1856. Museum no. 290-1935

Photographing the Great Depression, then and now – Dorothea Lange

Jonathan Jones writing in the Guardian makes valid and pertinent points using Lange’s image as a start to assess the current world financial crisis.

“Dorothea Lange‘s stark portraits of poverty-stricken Americans in the 1930s seem terrifyingly contemporary…………When Lange took her photograph, times were terrible. But there were powerful voices of optimism and rationality, from Roosevelt to John Maynard Keynes, and these voices would win through in the end. In 2011 American politics seems headed in the opposite direction to the forward-looking road it took in the 1930s, while everywhere primitive gloom is in the ascendant. In this sense the situation does not resemble the 1930s. It is potentially far worse.”

Read the whole article here

Florence Owens Thompson, a migrant worker and mother of seven children. Photograph: Dorothea Lange/Getty Images