The first gallery that we visited whilst in New York was the International Centre of Photography, there were a few exhibitions on at this time offering a range of different photography under one roof. The main exhibition that was on was the Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David Seymour entitled The Mexican Suitcase. This series contains 4,500 35mm negatives from the Spanish civil war in 1936-1939, these images were considered lost since 1939 until today where they are being displayed here and are the most famous group of recovered negatives of the twentieth century. These three photographers all worked in Spain whilst living in Paris during this time, they are considered to be some of the most influential modern war photographers of our time.
As the images were lost, no contact sheets were recovered, therefore these films show us the actual order in which the images were conceived and shot, every single image that each photographer took during this war is exhibited here, no edits were made.
There was such a large amount of work on display here, offering us three different perspectives on one war, images that had been lost in time, finally being displayed for all to see.
I really enjoyed the rawness of this exhibition, the strips of negatives displayed on the walls and some enlarged and printed straight onto the wall, this allowed us to see every detail of each image. This exhibition was particularly interesting to me as documentary is my chosen genre within photography, and I particularly love war photography. The reason I love war photography is because it allows you to see into a world that you are unfamiliar with, you hear about war in the news but sometimes this can be a biased view or limited in some way. War photographers often are right where the action is, capturing what the civilians are seeing and going through something that may be missed out within the news. This links to the lecture that we had on documentary forms, and asks the question that is common with all documentary photography, are these images the truth? These images differ to other war photographs as these have never been published and of course have been lost for many years. As the images have been displayed in this gallery as strips of negatives we can see that these images are the truth. Many war images we see are in newspapers, where they may have been cropped or edited in order to portray a certain message to the audience. These images offer us the reality as to what was happening during this war, although we cannot say totally that these images have no been constructed. Obviously the photographer themselves chose what they wanted to photograph and how they composed the images but they are some of the most accurate representations of this war.
Another exhibition that interested me within this gallery was Jasper, Texas by Alonzo Jordan, this was a collection of images taken by Jordan who was initially a barber but took up photography and actively documented the world he lived and worked in. Jasper is a small quiet town in East of Texas which was shocked to be the place of the most brutal race crime in U.S history, in 1998 49 year old James Byrd, JR. was dragged to his death by three white men in a pick up truck. Jordan's work created images that affirmed the identities of his subjects, enabling them to see themselves as individuals in the context of the social fabric of family and community. Jordan's images offered us an insight into the black community during the 1950's and Jordan actually took James Byrd, JR graduation photograph.
Alonzo Jordan showed us the happy, care free together black community that was later to be shocked with this horrendous race crime.
The last exhibition that interested me in a critical way was a series of images from photographer Wang Qingsong When Worlds Collide. This was the first U.S. solo show of the Beijing artist, one of China's most influential contemporary artists. Qingsong creates large scale scenes involving dozens of models and built sets, they combine references to classic Chinese art with ironic nods to China's new material wealth and rapidly growing consumer culture. Qingsong makes references to this consumer culture through placing Coke cans and other well known brands within his images. This links to the lectures we had on popular culture and globalisation, globalisation can be defined as growth to a global or worldwide scale; "the globalization of the communication industry". Qingsong is using his photography to make witty references to the impact of globalisation and modernisation in China, whilst still referencing art history.
The image below is making a direct reference to popular culture, obviously the Mcdonalds and Coke signs represent Western consumerism. It appears as if the West are larger then China and are bombarding them with their fast food restaurants and brand drinks, China are pleading with them to stop which represents Qingsong pleading to hold on to the traditional Chinese ways.
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