Perry Dilbeck

Perry Dilbeck Photography

Perry Dilbeck at The Blue Earth Alliance

Perry Dilbeck at The Photo-Eye Gallery

Perry Dilbeck Biography:

Perry Dilbeck, a native of McDonough, Georgia, became interested in photography at the early age of fifteen. Throughout his college years, he earned an Associate of Arts degree from The Art Institute of Atlanta, a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Georgia State University, and a Masters of Fine Arts degree from Savannah College of Art and Design - all in photography. He has spent several years as a freelance commercial photographer with many large corporate clients in the metropolitan Atlanta area. For nearly twelve years now, Dilbeck has been a photography instructor at The Art Institute of Atlanta. His major expertise is black and white printing, and he has a very lavish darkroom in his house where he is able to do his own film processing and print developing.

For the past ten years Dilbeck has worked on a series of black and white images entitled - The Last Harvest-Truck Farmers in the Deep South which tells the story of the fading lifestyle of Southern truck farmers. Photographed primarily with simple plastic cameras called Holgas, this work has been published worldwide in many photo magazines. Images from this series have been collected nationally and exhibited in galleries throughout the United States.

In November 2006, the University of Georgia Press in association with Center For American Places published - The Last Harvest-Truck Farmers in the Deep South as a monograph. Look for it at your local bookstores or favorite online bookseller.

Perry Dilbeck has achieved much recognition for his work and was most recently awarded Georgia Author of the year for The Last Harvest-Truck Farmers in the Deep South. He also received an artist sponsorship from Blue Earth Alliance in Seattle, WA. In addition to this, in 2006 the National Geographic Society-All Roads Project nominated The Last Harvest project honorable mention. The Texas Photographic Society awarded Dilbeck a fellowship in 2004 and he was also named a Vision 2003 Award Winner from the Santa Fe Center for Visual Arts. In addition, Perry was awarded sabbaticals from The Art Institute of Atlanta for Summer 2003 and Spring 2010.

Perry Dilbeck Artist's Statement for his "Last Harvest" project:

Much of the farmland around my home is vanishing rapidly due to the growth in population and the numerous subdivisions which are being built to accommodate this growth. Twenty years ago, there were only sixteen houses on my hometown road of three miles, but today more than two thousand exist. Most of this change is due to the commercial farming industry destroying the business of the small independent farmer and forcing him to make money the only way he can - by selling his farmland.

Each truck farmer typically owns less than thirty acres of land grows food for his family. His survival is dependent upon selling any surplus crops at local farmer’s markets, along the roadside from the back of his truck, or a simple stand in his own backyard.

While concentrating on old farmers whose land and homestead have been passed down through many generations, I have decided to document their fading world. I particularly wish to provide small, yet majestic glimpses into the lifestyles of these very proud people.

I use my Pentax 6 x 7 camera for about 20% of my work. The other 80% comes by using a simple "plastic" camera to obtain the desired effects.

All images are printed by myself on warm-toned paper and are available in both 11 x 14 and 16 x 20 sizes.

Tina Modotti

Tina Modotti Gallery

Tina Modotti on Masters of Photography

Tina Modotti on Goggle Images

Tina Modotti on Da Metz Design

Tina Modotti Biography from ProFots.com:

Tina Modotti was a remarkable woman and an outstanding photographer whose legendary beauty and relationships with famous men have until now eclipsed a life integrally linked to the most important artistic, political and historical developments of our century.

In 1913 Tina Modotti left her native Italy for San Francisco, becoming a star of the local Italian theatre before marrying the romantic poet-painter Roubaix de I'Abrie Richey. By 1920, she had embarked on a Hollywood film career and immersed herself in bohemian Los Angeles, beginning an intense relationship with the respected American photographer, Edward Weston. On a trip to Mexico in 1922 to bury her husband, she met the Mexican muralists and became enthralled with the burgeoning cultural renaissance there.

Increasingly dissatisfied with the film world, she persuaded Weston to teach her photography and move with her to Mexico. Her Mexico City homes became renowned gathering places for artists, writers and radicals, where Diego Rivera courted Frida Kahlo. Turning her camera to record Mexico in its most vibrant years, her photographs achieve a striking synthesis of artistic form and social content. Her contact with Mexico's muralists including a brief affair with Rivera, led to her involvement in radical politics.

In 1929, she was framed for the murder of her Cuban lover, gunned down at her side on a Mexico City street. A scapegoat of government repression, she was publicly slandered in a sensational trial before being acquitted. Expelled from Mexico in 1930, she went to Berlin and then to the Soviet Union, where she abandoned photography for a political activism that brought her into contact with Sergei Eisenstein, Alexandra Kollontaii, La Pasionaria, Ernest Hemingway and Robert Capa. Returning to Mexico incognito in 1939, she died three years later, a lonely - and controversial - death.

More on her controversial death from The Tina Modotti Gallery:

In 1942, while riding in a taxi after a friend’s party, she suffered a heart attack and died. There were rumours of murder—was it the Stalinists? Her lover, Victorio Vidali? But most attributed her death to the hardships she had endured.

Modotti died from heart failure in Mexico City in 1942 under what is viewed by some as suspicious circumstances. After hearing about her death, Diego Rivera suggested that Vidali had orchestrated it. Modotti may have ‘known too much’ about Vidali’s activities in Spain, which included a rumoured 400 executions. Her grave is located within the vast Panteón de Dolores in Mexico City. Poet Pablo Neruda composed Tina Modotti’s epitaph, part of which can also be found on her tombstone, which also includes a relief portrait of Modotti by engraver Leopoldo Méndez:

"Pure your gentle name, pure your fragile life, bees, shadows, fire, snow, silence and foam,combined with steel and wire andpollen to make up your firmand delicate being."

John Szarkowski on Tina Modotti from "Looking at Photographs:  100 Pictures from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art":

"Although it is doubtless (or probably) irrelevant to the issue at hand, Modotti was surely one of the most fascinating women of her time, even without reference to her talent as an artist. She was an actress, a sometime revolutionary (by design or circumstance, or both), a great beauty, and a great mystery. The available evidence would suggest that everyone who crossed her path was profoundly impressed. Kenneth Rexroth identified her as a Kollontai type, and was terrified, but nevertheless called her the most spectacular person in Mexico City."

Roy DeCarava

Roy DeCarava on Masters of Photography

Roy DeCarava Photos of Harlem from Listicles, the "L" magazine

Remembering Roy DeCarava's 60 Years Of Photos:  NPR story from "Fresh Air" broadcast on WHYY

Roy DeCarava's Obituary from the London Times (November 6, 2009):

In the mid-1950s street photography was generally a documentarian’s medium, useful in the service of social change. Yet Roy DeCarava was as preoccupied with light and shade as with his insider’s view of a down-at-heel, largely African-American New York neighbourhood.

He was mentored early in his career by Edward Steichen, but went on to forge a unique identity as a master of formal composition. Trained as a painter and printmaker, DeCarava was influenced by Rembrandt and Michelangelo. He used velvety greys and stark contrasts of light and shade to endow his images with sculptural dimension and drama. Shooting in ambient light, he printed in such a way as to coax light and dark from his picture, so that a child walking down a Harlem street might be bathed in celestial light and surrounded by menacing shadows.

Troubled by the absence of beautiful, complex images of African Americans, DeCarava had stepped in. During the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s he revealed hidden corners of Harlem — subway stations, restaurants, apartment interiors — to viewers who would not otherwise have had exposure to that world. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he did so not as a consciousness-raising exercise. His photographs were intended to stand on their own, outside a sociological or missionary context, as works of art.
Seeking and winning a Guggenheim fellowship in 1952, at Steichen’s encouragement, DeCarava wrote in his application that his goal was to provide “penetrating insight” into black culture. But he also aimed to depict his black subjects in a “serious and artistic way”.

His 1955 book The Sweet Flypaper of Life, done in collaboration with the poet Langston Hughes, was a bestseller, and DeCarava’s work was widely exhibited and acclaimed. But he did not always make commercial approval his priority. Though many of his portraits were of African Americans, he resisted being identified and marketed as a “black artist”, and he doggedly guarded control over the presentation of his work, once withdrawing from an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The 1969 Met show, “Harlem on My Mind”, had failed to include the views of black civic leaders in its planning stages. DeCarava, invited to contribute his work, instead joined the picket line.

Roy Rudolph DeCarava was born in Harlem in 1919, the only child of a Jamaican single mother, Elfreda Ferguson. He attended vocational school, all the while doing odd jobs — shining shoes, delivering ice — to help meet expenses. A teacher from his New York public school once came to the house and urged his mother to foster his artistic talent.

His mother, herself an amateur photographer, provided art supplies and music lessons, and DeCarava gained admission to the Cooper Union, the prestigious institute in Manhattan, to study art and architecture. After two years there, discouraged by what he described as a hostile reception by the overwhelmingly white student body, he attended the Harlem Community Art Centre. While studying painting there, he also made signs for the Works Progress Administration, a project of Roosevelt’s New Deal.

DeCarava briefly served in the Army during the Second World War as a topographical draughtsman, then worked in New York as a painter and commercial illustrator. Initially using photographs as references for drawings, he was drawn to the immediacy of the photographic medium. Despite the painterly appearance of his work — with forms seeming to emerge from darkness by happenstance — his methods were precise and premeditated, reliant on darkroom techniques that changed the balance of light and shade after the fact.

In 1955 he opened an exhibition gallery in his apartment, showing the work of Berenice Abbott and other masters along with his own. Despite critical praise, sales were poor, and he closed the space after two years. A decade later he founded the Kamoinge Workshop (the name is a variation of the term “group effort” from the Bantu language of Kenya), giving young black photographers a place to show their work. During the civil rights movement of the 1960s DeCarava recorded scenes that grabbed his attention. In one image, Force, Downstate, (1963) a woman is grasped by the ankles and dragged off by police.

Starting in the late 1950s, DeCarava was employed as a photojournalist for Look and Newsweek magazines and, in the 1960s and 1970s, for Sports Illustrated. In the magazine world he encountered enough racism that, for three years in the mid-1960s, he was prompted to chair the American Society of Magazine Photographers’ Committee to End Discrimination Against Black Photographers. Magazine art directors, he said in a television interview in 1996, “were not used to seeing black artists walk through the door with a portfolio of photographs”, and some were “literally shaking” when they saw his work. DeCarava was engaged in a longstanding dispute with Gordon Parks, another pre-eminent black photographer, who did not agree with him about discrimination in their milieu.

Feeling constrained by the institutional structures and deadlines of journalism, DeCarava eventually gave up editorial work to teach at Cooper Union in the late 1960s and, beginning in 1975, at Hunter College. His work was the subject of a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1996. Throughout his career he returned to his native Harlem for material and inspiration. Prominent African Americans — Lena Horne, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis — were subjects of his portraits. Yet some of his most famous images were of anonymous, wistful figures — like a young girl in a white graduation dress, shrouded in bright light, juxtaposed with a garbage-strewn urban lot. She lifts her hem delicately, in an apparent rebuke to the impurity around her.

According to Peter Galassi, a curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, DeCarava was “looking at everyday life in Harlem from the inside, not as a sociological or political vehicle”. In a 2006 interview the photographer described the essence of his art as “taking what is and making it yours”.
His wife, Sherry Turner, an art historian, survives him, together with four children.

Roy DeCarava, photographer, was born on December 9, 1919. He died on October 27, 2009, aged 89

Gordon Parks

"Those people who want to use a camera should have something in mind, there's something they want to show, something they want to say...," Parks explains. "I picked up a camera because it was my choice of weapons against what I hated most about the universe: racism, intolerance, poverty.  Icould have just as easily picked up a knife of a gun, like many of my childhood friends did... most of whom were murdered or put in prison... but I chose not to go that way. I felt that I could somehow subdue these evils by doing something beautiful that people recognize me by, and thus make a whole different life for myself, which has proved to be so."

 

Gordon Parks Center for Culture and Diversity

Gordon Parks Farm Security Administration Photographs

Gordon Parks:  PDN & Kodak Professional Legends on Line

Gordon Parks at the Farm Security Administration:

Gordon Parks was born in Kansas in 1912 and spent his youth in Minnesota. During the Depression a variety of jobs, including stints as a musician and as a waiter on passenger trains, took him to various parts of the northern United States. He took up photography during his travels and by 1940 had made his first serious attempts to earn a living from the art as a self-taught fashion photographer in Minneapolis and Chicago. Though he had experienced racial discrimination outside the South, it was in the southern city of Washington, D.C., that Parks "found out what prejudice was really like." In 1942, an opportunity to work for the Farm Security Administration brought the photographer to the nation's capital; Parks later recalled that "discrimination and bigotry were worse there than any place I had yet seen."1

Parks came to Washington on a fellowship from the Julius Rosenwald Fund, a foundation dedicated to research about the South, which had a special program to encourage work of all kinds by promising blacks. As a Rosenwald fellow, Parks joined the august company of Ralph Bunche, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, and many others.3
Parks, who had admired the Farm Security Administration photographs for some time, planned to spend his fellowship year as an apprentice photographer in Stryker's section and had received encouragement from the FSA Jack Delano when he was applying for the fellowship.4 But when he arrived in Washington, he recalled in 1983, Stryker resisted, expressing worries about the reaction of others--in the agency as well as in the city--to a black photographer. "When I went there," Parks said, "Roy didn't want to take me into the FSA, but the Rosenwald people were a part of that whole Rooseveltian thing. They insisted: 'Roy, you've got to do it.'" As Parks remembered it, Will Alexander--the vice-president of the Rosenwald Fund and the former head of the Farm Security Administration and thus Stryker's old boss--delivered the final nudge.5

Parks's autobiography and interviews emphasize the importance of the education Stryker gave him.6 After asking Parks to leave his cameras in the office, Stryker sent the newly arrived photographer around Washington, instructing him to visit stores, restaurants, and theaters. When Parks was refused service, he became furious and returned to the office ready to "show the rest of the world what your great city of Washington, D.C. is really like," proposing to photograph scenes of injustice and portraits of bigots. In response, Stryker sent Parks to the file to study the work of Lange, Shahn, Evans, Delano, Rothstein, and others. Parks studied their photographs of gutted fields, dispossessed migrants, and the gaunt faces of people caught in the Depression. Although some might lay these tragedies to God, Parks wrote, "the research accompanying these stark photographs accused man himself--especially the lords of the land." As the effectiveness of photographing victims instead of perpetrators and the importance of the words that accompany photographs sank in, Parks concluded, "I began to get the point."7

One evening a few weeks later when he was alone in the office with Stryker, Parks said he was still seeking a way to expose intolerance with a camera. Stryker pointed out a charwoman at work in the building. "Go have a talk with her," he said, "See what she has to say about life and things." Parks complied, and later recalled his first conversation with Ella Watson:

She began to spill out her life's story. It was a pitiful one. She had struggled alone after her mother had died and her father had been killed by a lynch mob. She had gone through high school, married and become pregnant. Her husband was accidentally shot to death two days before their daughter was born. By the time the daughter was eighteen, she had given birth to two illegitimate children, dying two weeks after the second child's birth. What's more, the first child had been striken with paralysis a year before its mother died.8

Parks made his first photographs of Watson in an office with a large American flag on the wall, two of which are included here. Both pictures are carefully posed, and the multiple shadows cast by the office furniture indicate that Parks used an elaborate three-flash setup. The close-up version is one of his most famous photographs, serving as the frontispiece in Parks's word-and-picture poem Moments without Proper Names, a book dedicated to Roy Stryker and containing a memorial poem for Farm Security Administration photographer John Vachon.10 "

In 1983, when Parks reflected on the lessons he had learned from photographing this series, his thoughts returned to the matter of intolerance. He told an interviewer that he could not simply photograph the person who had discriminated against him, "and say, 'This is a bigot,' because bigots have a way of looking just like everybody else. What the camera had to do was expose the evils of racism, the evils of poverty, the discrimination and the bigotry, by showing the people who suffered most under it."13 In the same interview, he underscored the reasoning behind the title of his 1965 autobiography, A Choice of Weapons: "I have always felt as though I needed a weapon against evil."14 Parks's weapon is the camera.

Eugene Atget

Atget Collection at The George Eastman House

Atget Exhibition at The International Center of Photography

Atget Collection at The J. Paul Getty Museum

Atget Collection on Masters of Photography

Atget Biography from Atget.com:

French, 1857-1927:  The life and the intention of Eugene Atget are fundamentally unknown to us. A few documented facts and a handful of recollections and legends provide a scant outline of the man.  He was born in Libourne, near Bordeaux, in 1857, and worked as a sailor during his youth; from the sea he turned to the stage, with no more than minor success; at forty he quit acting, and after a tentative experiment with painting Atget became a photographer, and began his true life's work.

Until his death thirty years later he worked quietly at his calling. To a casual observer he might have seemed a typical commercial photographer of the day. He was not progressive, but worked patiently with techniques that were obsolescent when he adopted them, and very nearly anachronistic by the time of his death. He was little given to experiment in the conventional sense, and less to theorizing. He founded no movement and attracted no circle. He did however make photographs which for purity and intensity of vision have not been bettered.

Atget's work is unique on two levels. He was the maker of a great visual catalogue of the fruits of French culture, as it survived in and near Paris in the first quarter of this century. He was in addition a photographer of such authority and originality that his work remains a bench mark against which much of the most sophisticated contemporary photography measures itself. Other photographers had been concerned with describing specific facts (documentation), or with exploiting their indivisual sensibilities (self-expression). Atget enconpassed and transcended both approaches when he set himself the task of understanding and interpreting in visual terms a complex, ancient, and living tradition.

The pictures that he made in the service of this concept are seductively and deceptively simple, wholly poised, reticent, dense with experience, mysterious, and true.

 

Atget Biography from Photo-Seminars.com:

Eugene Atget photographed Paris for thirty years. With a singleness of purpose rarely excelled, he made his incredible monument to a city. When he died in 1927 he left approximately 2000 eight by ten inches glass plates and almost 10,000 prints, not counting the plates deposited in the Palais Royale archives. Here is one of the most extraordinary achievements of photography. Yet we know almost nothing of Atget as a person and less of Atget as a photographer. His history is to be read in his work.

Eugene Atget Life:  Atget was born in Bordeaux in 1856. An orphan, he was brought up by an uncle. At an early age he shipped to sea as cabin boy. Doubtless his early experiences made a deep impression and enriched his vision of the world, for in later years he vividly recited to friends amusing anecdotes of this period. Early in his life his faculties of observation were sharpened and developed.

As a young man, he turned to the stage, first in the French provincial cities then in the suburbs of Paris. His physique fitted him only for the less attractive roles usually the villain’s part. As maturity approached, acting became an unrewarding occupation. To what should he turn? He had a lively liking for painting and associated a great deal with painters. He considered being one of them and indeed tried his hand at painting, a number of examples of his own brushwork were found at his studio upon his death.

Finally he decided to be a photographer, an art photographer. He already had an ambition to create a collection of all that was artistic and picturesque in Paris and its surroundings. An immense subject. Atget obtained equipment and with a sack full of plates on his back "started off." Thus began a vast esthetic documentation, a labor of love for thirty years.

It is necessary to qualify the meaning of "art photographer" as well as "esthetic" documentation, since these terms mean different things to different people. Never was Atget "arty." His art stems from his grasping of the photographic medium without confusion or imitation of painting. His vision, backed by heart and brain, mature sensitivity and above all selectivity was well synthesized and projected for the beholder to understand and thereby to be enriched. Maturity, in this case, was not a handicap but a powerful ingredient.

Armed with the experience of travel, observation, and drama, Atget photographed the monuments of Paris, houses, sites, chateaux, streets, subjects about to disappear. Photography was no more materially rewarding than acting. Nevertheless he persevered, lugging his unwieldy view camera and heavy glass plates. One day Luc-Olivier-Merson bought a print for fifteen francs. Atget rejoiced and was encouraged. The playwright Victorien Sardou became interested in his work and put him on the track of vanishing Paris. Before the World War of 1914-1918, Atget was gradually winning recognition and financial support.

But the war broke out "the second that Atget had seen. He had a horror of it, he loved his work so much." People thought he was a spy or lunatic. He no longer sold anything when there was peace again, he was an old man. He produced less and less, lived, as it were, on his capital of old work. The archives of the Palais Royale acquired some of his plates, but at low prices and purely for their record value. So Atget’s life moved to its close: In 1927 he died, without public recognition or understanding of the vast importance of his work.

Atget’s Photography:  Atget assigned himself an alluring and provoking subject, the city of Paris, the dream city of thousands of struggling, aspiring, gifted and would-be poets, painters, composers. Paris, the city of art and bridges over the Seine, of boulevards and cafes, of narrow, crooked streets and gray plane trees in the beautiful Luxembourg gardens.

To Atget, Paris was not a dream but an actuality a fact of hard material expressions, of strange contrasts and contradictions. It was weathered, eroded facades of mansion and humble dwelling; ornate construction of wrought iron grilles and balconies; fantasy of shop signs and carousels; visible magic of rich grapes, cherries, cauliflower’s, lobsters, heaped in luxuriance in Les Halles; formal elegance of Versailles and the Trianon; rustic primitiveness of a plow lying in furrows outside the fortifications; outmoded forms of carriage and horse-drawn cabriolet; excitement of an eclipse seen by crowds in the Place de l’Opera; a thousand and yet another thousand images of the miracle of daily reality.

In recreating Paris for us and for all time, Atget gave it permanent reality by utilizing photography in its own right. He did not veer toward excessive concern with technique nor toward the imitation of painting but steered a straight course, making the medium speak for itself in a superb rendering of materials, textures, surfaces, details. Within the limits of his equipment, he recorded all phases of the life about him: people, street activity, the city proper.

 

Atget’s Equipment:  The photographs reveal Atget’s method of work. His equipment consisted of a simple 18 X 24 cm view camera, with almost none of the present-day adjustments. It had a rising front, as may be seen by the photographs, many of whose corners have been cut off because the lens did not give full coverage. He had no wide-angle lens. The focal length of his lens is unknown, but it must have been between eleven and twelve inches. Atget used glass plates. As for accessories, he certainly did not use an exposure meter. At most he made use of a simple coefficient table with mathematical calculations. But it is more likely that he judged exposure by his vast experience with light conditions, subject matter, and type of plate emulsion. Because the emulsion used then were non-color-sensitive, he never used filters. For interior work, he used no artificial light of any sort but availed himself always of natural light. Any shutter used with the lens was at most a simple bulb shutter. Atget made a practice of closing down to a small aperture if conditions permitted. Only when he photographed people did he open up the diaphragm and focus critically on the center of interest, leaving the background out of focus. It is doubtful if his lens could have been faster than 1/11 at its widest opening. It would seem from the photographs themselves that most of them were taken during the summer months when the sun’s actinic rays are stronger. Also most of the human figures of these series are posed to the extent that Atget probably asked them "to hold still a moment."

Because he did not have the advantage of fast lenses and fast emulsions, Atget had to solve his photographic problems within the capacities of his materials. Since his equipment and materials were not adequate to stop fast action, he worked a great deal in the early hours of the day, rising at dawn.

Atget’s photographs are the supreme proof that photography is more than a "machine." Except for the complex factors of stopping motion, Atget found no obstacle to making his photographs an extremely expressive comment on life. Not the camera, but Atget himself dictated what would be set down in these beautiful prints. The intensity of his purpose and vision was the powerful drive which compelled him to undergo long years of neglect and hard work. At the same time he accepted the tremendous labor of his method, carrying the cumbersome view camera many miles, weighed down by bulky glass plates. For him the camera was but an instrument for expressing his intense awareness of life.

In personal matters Atget was, if not an eccentric was uncompromising. From the age of 50, he lived solely on milk, bread, and pieces of sugar. He was absolute in hygiene and in art. This determination when applied to photography created a unique monument.