Robert Frank

was born to a wealthy Jewish family in Switzerland. Though Frank and his family remained safe in Switzerland during World War II, the threat of Nazism nonetheless affected his understanding of oppression. He turned to photography as a means to escape the confines of his business-oriented family and home, and trained under a few photographers and graphic designers before he created his first hand-made book of photographs, 40 Fotos, in 1946.

Frank emigrated to the United States in 1947, and secured a job in New York City as a fashion photographer for Harper's Bazaar. He soon left to travel in South America and Europe. He created another hand-made book of photographs that he shot in Peru, and returned to the U.S. in 1950. That year was momentous for Frank, who participated in the group show 51 American Photographers at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA); he also married fellow artist, Mary Lockspeiser, with whom he had two children, Andrea and Pablo.

Though he was initially optimistic about United States society and culture, Frank's perspective quickly changed as he confronted the fast pace of American life and what he saw as an overemphasis on money. He saw America as an often bleak and lonely place, a perspective that became evident in his later photography. Frank's own dissatisfaction with the control that editors exercised over his work tainted his experience.

His experiences in America lead him to create The Americans. The book was highly influential in post-war American photography. First published in France in 1958, and the following year in the United States, the photographs are notable for their distanced view of both high and low American society. The book as a whole created a complicated portrait of the period that was viewed as skeptical of contemporary values.

Frank found a tension in the gloss of American culture and wealth over race and class differences. While driving through Arkansas, Frank was thrown in jail for three days after being stopped by the police who accused him of being a communist; he was also told by a sheriff elsewhere in the South that he had "an hour to leave town."

Opinion

Frank's photographs have a clear contrast to those of most contemporary American photographers and photojournalists. His use of unusual focus, low lighting and cropping deviate severly from accepted photographic techniques. His works transcend the making of a great exposure and fall into the realm of artistic intent.

Frank's images speak in ways they normally could not had he made a perfect print. A perfect print would obviously not been right for the age from his perspective. The world was messed up, uneaqual. America was not representing the image it was trying to cast forth onto other coutries and Frank yearned to expose the truth about America and its culture.

Thomas E. Franklin

 is a 1988 graduate of the State University of New York at Purchase. He has been with The Record since 1993, and has been a professional photojournalist and documentary photographer for over 20 years.

He has won numerous awards for his photography, and his work has been widely published and exhibited.

In 2005, his documentary film, Ford's Toxic Legacy, was the winner of the New Jersey Film Festival's Best Jersey Film award. The documentary lead to the expossure of toxic dumping by the Ford Motor Company and its impact on the Ramapough Indians and the environmen.

Franklin has appeared on radio and television many times to discuss his photography. He has been a guest on many national programs, including: The Today Show, Good Morning America, CNN, and Oprah. He has been a guest lecturer at major colleges and universities around the country and remains a highly sought-after public speaker in his local community, where he frequently speaks to civics groups, schools, corporations, and local organizations as a motivational speaker, sharing his unique experiences of 9/11 and his career.

Franklin rose to national acclaim for his coverage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York. His now iconic image of three firemen raising a flag above the rubble of the World Trade Center, taken hours after the attacks, is one of the most identifiable and powerful images in history. Life Magazine listed it as one of the "100 Photographs That Changed the World," and the photo is part of the permanent collection of the Library of Congress.

A Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2002 for his photographs from 9/11, Franklin has received dozens of national awards from; MSNBC, Society for Professional Journalists, Editor & Publisher, the Deadline Club, National Headliners, among others.

The flag-rasing photo was made shortly after 5 p.m on September 11, 2001. He was standing under a pedestrian walkway across the West Side Highway, which connected the World Trade Center to the World Financial Center at the northwest corner.

In 2002, the United States Postal Service introduced the "Heroes" stamp, featuring the flag-raising photo. Proceeds from the stamp have raised over ten million dollars to help families and rescue workers of 9/11. Also in 2002, an autographed original print signed by Franklin and the three firemen pictured in the photo, sold for $89,625 at Christie's Auction House, with proceeds benefiting two 9/11 charities. The photo has also been instrumental in raising money for other charitable causes, including Juvenile Diabetes, autism, cerebral palsy.

Opinion

Right place, right time photography. 

The works of Franklin carry a wistful desire to return in thought to a former time in life before the acknowledged violence and war; there is a sentimental yearning for the happiness which no one of this day and age will see.

Nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories. What seemed great in the past might or might not actually be better. There is no clear idea of what is an improvement or a perfection is in the grand scheme of things. However, there is a hope within the images that one day life will be at least satisfactory. They suggest that the past will cease to haunt individuals.

George Krause

From the introduction by Mark Power...


"He will probably tell you his work is about fantasy, and if you ask him about influences he might mention Cartier-Bresson, Strand and Kertesz, influences that are more philosophical than visual."


George Krause was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1937 and received his training at the Philadelphia College of Art. He received the first Prix de Rome and the first Fulbright/Hays grant ever awarded to a photographer, two Guggenheim fellowships and three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.


While serving in the US Army between 1957 and 1959, George Krause turned his full attention to photography, spending all his free time documenting the culture of the black neighborhoods in the racially segregated communities of South Carolina. Krause subsequently moved in a less documentary direction, seeking images that were more ambiguous, more symbolically rich and open to interpretation.  Bodies of work have included cemetery monuments, religious statuary, and an atypical series of nudes.

Krause's photographs are in major museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. In 1993 he was honored as the Texas Artist of the Year.


Krause enjoyed considerable early success with this social documentary work yet has recently retired from the University of Houston where he created the photography program .

He now lives in Wimberley, Texas.

Opinion


What interested me about George Krause was his Sfumato Series. The concept is derived from the Italian word sfumare, "to tone down" or "to evaporate like smoke". In painting or drawing, sfumato is the fine shading that produces soft, imperceptible transitions between colours and tones. It is used most often in connection with the works of Leonardo da Vinci and his followers, who made subtle gradations, without lines or borders, from light to dark areas; the technique was used for a highly illusionistic rendering of facial features and for atmospheric effects.

Therefore, I propose that Krause is using sfumato as a type of classical reference to great artists of the past as well as giving pause to individuals. His portraits in this series negate backgrounds forcing the viewer to focus solely on the person. The sfumato technique demands that viewers step close and inspect the use of gradation and, thus, allows them to see the attention to facial features and clothes. 

Standing back and away from the works allows sfumato to breath giving the viewer a sense that the person in the photograph could disappear in a puff of smoke if they are not viewed carefully.

Abbas Attar

was born in 1944 and is an Iranian photographer known for his photojournalism in Biafra, Vietnam and South Africa in the 1970s. Attar has dedicated his photographic work to the political and social coverage of the wars and revolutions in Biafra, Bangladesh, Ulster, Vietnam, and the Middle East.

From 1978 to 1980, he photographed the revolution in Iran, and returned in 1997 after a 17 years voluntary exile. His book iranDiary 1971-2002 is a critical interpretation of its history, photographed and written as a personal diary.

From 1987 to 1994 he photographed the resurgence of Islam from the Xinjiang to Morocco. His book and exhibition Allah O Akbar, a journey through militant Islam exposes the internal tensions within Muslim societies, torn between a mythical past and a desire for modernization and democracy. The book draws special attention after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

From 2000 to 2002 he worked on Animism asking the question: In our world defined by science and technology, why do irrational rituals make a strong come-back? He abandoned this project on the first anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist action in New York. His latest book, In Whose Name? The Islamic World after 9/1, is a seven years quest within 16 countries : opposed by governments who hunt them mercilessly, the jihadists lose many battles, but are they not winning the war to control the mind of the people, with the "creeping islamisation" of all Muslim societies?


Abbas is presently travelling in the world of Buddhism, photographing with the same skeptical eye.


About his photography Abbas writes:

"My photography is a reflection, which comes to life in action and leads to meditation. Spontaneity – the suspended moment – intervenes during action, in the viewfinder. A reflection on the subject precedes it. A meditation on finality follows it, and it is here, during this exalting and fragile moment, that the real photographic writing develops, sequencing the images. For this reason a writer’s spirit is necessary to this enterprise. Isn’t photography 'writing with light'? But with the difference that while the writer possesses his word, the photographer is himself possessed by his photo, by the limit of the real which he must transcend so as not to become its prisoner."

Opinion


Haunting. The reality of one culture is not the same reality as another culture. Being in a new country is like going to another planet, the system is sometimes completely opposite than one believes it should.

Imagine it this way. Krypton explodes but not before two parents ship their child off in a rocket hoping the child lands in a safe place. The Child lands in California (because Metropolis doesn't exist), grows up, and 'saves the world every day' by beating up bad guys and destroying huge skyscrapers (even on an accident). There would be lots of dead people under building rubble. All in the name of truth and justice...


Now crash land the child in a middle east country where children are raised with guns, still fighting for what they believe is right. No huge skyscrapers but lots of dead people who were killed because the wielder of power believed the other person was wrong and that he needed to show the world real truth and justice...


Who is really right?


I think that is what Attar's photographs and books are all about. To force viewers to look at other cultures in a new, objective light. It is a social realism of 'you are an American so you do American things but if you were raised in the middle east you would do what they do too'.