Take a peek at the photograph below and join our contest to see who can come up with the most creative caption for this image. The winner will receive a $10 Amazon gift card along with serious bragging rights for being crowned “Most Creative.”
To enter, simply leave your caption in the comment box below by Wednesday, November 7th and check back Thursday morning to see who is crowned the winner. Good luck!
October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month—a month awash in pink; pink ribbons, races, rallies; pink lights illuminating landmark buildings; pink shoes worn by NFL players. This sugary color is everywhere to remind us about a hideous disease that ravages 1 in 8 women and more than 2,100 men each year. It is there to implore us to get screenings and inspire us to raise funds for research so we can put an end to it.
While this is all good, it has its limits. To me there’s no better way to understand the reality of breast cancer than to experience The SCAR Project. This book and photographic exhibition goes far beyond the pink and grabs us by the throat, forcing us to come face to face with the human dimension of this disease, reminding us that under no uncertain terms is breast cancer a pink ribbon.
Image courtesy The SCAR Project/David Jay
Australian-based fashion photographer, David Jay, created this project to pay tribute to young breast cancer survivors under age 40, a group least often associated with the disease even though it’s the leading cause of deaths in young women ages 15 to 40. Ten thousand women in this age group will be diagnosed this year alone.
His raw portraits may be difficult to look at, but even harder to to forget because these courageous and beautiful women represent breast cancer stripped down to the bare truth.
Image courtesy The SCAR Project/David Jay
Image courtesy The SCAR Project/David Jay
Image courtesy The SCAR Project/David Jay
Image courtesy of The SCAR Project/David Jay
Image courtesy of The SCAR Project/David Jay
Image courtesy The SCAR Project/David Jay
Speaking about the project in Digital Photo Pro, Jay says, “For these young women, having their portrait taken seems to represent their personal victory over this terrifying disease. It helps them reclaim their femininity, their sexuality, identity and power after having been robbed of such an important part of it. Through these simple pictures, they seem to gain some acceptance of what has happened to them and the strength to move forward with pride.”
Image courtesy The SCAR Project/David Jay
To see more images and find additional information, please go to The SCAR Project: http://www.thescarproject.org.
or check out the book on Amazon.
Here’s a synopsis:
The SCAR Project: Breast cancer Is Not a Pink ribbon. Volume I is 126 pages and contains 50 portraits of young breast cancer survivors, as well as an autobiographical sketch by each woman, describing her experience with breast cancer. The SCAR Project is an exhibition of large-scale portraits of young breast cancer survivors shot by fashion photographer David Jay. The SCAR Project puts a raw, unflinching face on early onset breast cancer while paying tribute to the courage and spirit of so many brave young women. Dedicated to the more than 10,000 women under the age of 40 who will be diagnosed this year alone The SCAR Project is an exercise in awareness, hope, reflection and healing. The mission is three-fold: to raise public awareness of early-onset breast cancer, to raise funds for breast cancer research/outreach programs and to help young survivors see their scars, faces, figures and experiences through a new, honest and ultimately, empowering lens.
As I sit here grappling with how to explain the horrors of 9/11 to my 8-year old today, I can’t help but recall that gut-wrenching day like it was yesterday. I doubt there’s one among us who doesn’t feel the same.
Last year, on the 10th Anniversary of 9/11, I wrote an insanely long blog post recalling the events of that day. I had only just begun blogging and didn’t know that most people don’t have the time or inclination to read such lengthy pieces. I was also trying out a THEN and NOW format, in which I recalled memories from THEN and addressed current issues NOW. Much has changed in my blogging since then, but I thought I’d share this piece again in case you have the time or inclination to read it. Click here to take a peek.
Behind the Scenes: Johannesburg, May 1994. It’s a new day in South Africa. Historic change electrifies the air. Apartheid, the government’s official policy of racial segregation, has finally come to an end, and Nelson Mandela is about to be elected the country’s first black president in nearly three hundred fifty years.
The emotion surging through Jeffrey Aaronson as he photographs this momentous occasion mimics that of the country’s new flag shimmering in the wind.
It’s impossible to repress his awe, remembering it had been just four years earlier that Nelson Mandela had been released from prison after serving a 27-year sentence for leading the armed struggle against apartheid.
Mandela’s prophetic words, uttered upon his release from prison couldn’t ring more true today:
“Our march to freedom is irreversible”
Self-portraif of Edward Sheriff Curtis, circa 1889
EDWARD SHERIFF CURTIS
“Shadow Catcher” (1868-1952)
Perhaps America’s best-known photographer of Native Americans and the West, Edward S. Curtis spent three decades immersed in the culture of our nation’s indigenous peoples during the early 1900′s .
His ambitious project involved photographing more than eighty tribal groups west of the Mississippi–everyone from the Eskimo (Inuit) in the far north to the Hopi and the Comanche in the southwest to the Ute and Cheyenne and a multitude of others in between.
Curtis was born in 1868 near Whitewater, Wisconsin where he lived until he was six years old. HIs father, a Reverend and Civil War veteran, then moved the family to Minnesota.
Around that time more than 200 battles were being fought between US troops and Native American tribes–from the Dakota Territory down to Mexico. When Edward Curtis was eight years old Sioux and Cheyenne warriors defeated General George Custer and his troops at the Battle of Little Big Horn.
Curtis went to school until sixth grade then dropped out. Soon after he became interested in photography and built his first camera. The lens for his camera was brought back from the Civil War by his father. He and his father also shared a love of the outdoors and spent time together camping and canoeing. At seventeen, Curtis became an apprentice photographer in St. Paul, then two years later, when his family moved to Seattle, he became a partner in a photo studio.
His first Native American portrait, created in 1896, was of Princess Angeline, the elderly daughter of Chief Sealth of Seattle. It wasn’t long after that he launched into his epic project documenting the Native American traditional way of life–their dress, ceremonies, food, clothing, dwellings, burial customs, manners, and daily life.
Though he struggled to gain funding, eventually J.P. Morgan offered him $75,000, to be paid at $15,000 per year for five years, to create his 20-volume series entitled The North American Indian. It would comprise over two thousand photogravure plates and narrative about America’s indigenous, and Curtis feared, vanishing people. Native Americans were considered “savages” by many at the time, forced from their land and stripped of their rights.
Curtis would later write the following foward to Volume I of The North American Indian.
“The passing of every old man or woman means the passing of some tradition, some knowledge of sacred rites possessed by no other; consequently the information that is to be gathered, for the benefit of future generations, respecting the mode of life of one of the great races of mankind, must be collected at once….”
During this ambitious project, Curtis became known by some tribes as the “Shadow Catcher” as he captured the likeness of many important and well-known Indian people of that time, including Geronimo, Chief Joseph, Red Cloud, Medicine Crow and others. Not only did he create thousands of images, but he recorded hours of rare ethnographic information, including some 10,000 wax cylinder sound recordings of Indian speech, music, and tribal mythologies.
It took far more than five years to create all twenty volumes, and far more money. Curtis sacrificed much in order to fulfill his dream of documenting America’s indigenous peoples. Not only was he perpetually broke, and continually trying to find financing for the project, but his family life took a beating as well. His wife divorced him after twenty-seven years and his four children grew up essentially with an absent father much of their childhoods.
Curtis’ photographs, while recognized as some of the most important work of its time, have received criticism because they are said to be romanticized versions of Native American culture, and contrived reconstructions rather than true documentation. He was known at times to remove “modern” items from an image to make it more authentic.
Below are images selected from The Library of Congress’s Edward S. Curtis Collection. Some were published in The North American Indian. Others were not.
See if you can NAME THAT PHOTOGRAPHER from the following five clues:
1) This photographer dropped out of school in sixth grade and soon after built his or her first camera.
2) This photographer famously said: “Optimism, unaccompanied by personal effort, is merely a state of mind and not fruitful.”
3) This photographer was born in Wisconsin, moved to Minnesota, then later to Seattle, eventually settling in Los Angeles.
4) To earn money this photographer worked as an uncredited assistant cameraperson for Cecil B. DeMille during the filming of The Ten Commandments.
5) This photographer’s collection at the Library of Congress offers us an extensive look back into our history with more than 2,400 silver-gelatin, first generation photographic prints – some of which are sepia-toned – made from original glass negatives.
Leave your guess in the comment box below and check back tomorrow to see if you are correct.
Behind the scenes: It’s late June 1997 and Hong Kong is about to be handed back to China after 150 years of British rule. Jeffrey Aaronson has been hired by Time magazine to document the events leading up to the handover ceremony, which is taking place at midnight on June 30th.
He has spent the past two weeks photographing all across China with one of Time’s senior correspondents, Joanna McCreary. They’ve ventured to several of China’s outlying cities, showing that while Communist leaders proclaim there will be “One country, Two Systems” with the Hong Kong handover, China is already comprised of a tangle of systems and economic policies created by local municipalities.
This is a memorable assignment for many reasons. One is that it’s an historic event. The other is that Jeffrey is arrested in the city of Suzhou. His visa has expired and the police have discovered he’s been working on a tourist visa instead of an official journalist visa. He’s always done that to avoid being controlled by government minders.
Locked in a jail cell, Jeffrey tries to ignore the sense of dread washing over him. A grizzly policeman glares with distain, then says between long drags on his cigarette, “You have until midnight to leave China. You’d better be on a plane out of here or….”
Once he’s released Jeffrey immediately begins trying to figure out his next move. He discovers there’s only one flight left to Hong Kong (which is still British for another week), but it’s out of Shanghai, which is least two hours away–on a good traffic day. He has less than three hours and he still must go back to his hotel and pack, then get to the airport, buy his ticket and board the plane.
After phoning the correspondent to tell her what has transpired, he’s in a car on the way to Shanghai. His plan is to fly to Hong Kong and apply for a new tourist visa—knowing China is still not computerized and not likely to discover his recent incarceration. Then he’ll fly into Beijing the next day and meet back up with the correspondent.
After a heart-racing drive and an absurd made-for-TV-sprint through the airport, Jeffrey catches his flight just as they are closing the door.
The next day, after working with Mr. Kwok, his seedy connection in Hong Kong, he obtains a new visa and lands back in Beijing.
The correspondent, who is well-aware of what Jeffrey has just been through, recommends he rests and lays low, especially since she won’t be writing anything about Beijing.
Jeffrey, who has never been good at laying low, ignores Joanna’s advice and heads out to photograph anyway. In Tiananmen Square he happens upon a group of school children doing chalk drawings in celebration of the upcoming handover. A large “countdown clock” is ticking down the hours and minutes until the handover, which the mainland is exuberant about.
When he photographs these two schoolboys sporting 1997 glasses, he’s glad he followed his instincts instead of laying low. He knows he has just created an iconic image for their story. And he’s right. It becomes the cover of the magazine.
__________
A week later a similar situation happens. It’s the night of the handover ceremony and Jeffrey has been shooting all over Hong Kong, along with a small contingent of photographers working for Time. Each is assigned a dizzying number of symbolic events as the British say farewell.
Jeffrey is on a tight schedule trying to get from one event to the next. It’s the first assignment his editor has given him a cell phone to help with communication and logistics during this tricky project. It’s the size of a brick, but it’s indispensable.
He has spent much of the day with the last governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patton, and is now on his way to photograph the Britannia symbolically sailing out of Hong Kong Harbor.
The streets are filled with drunk Expats as they try to forget about their future and their certain loss of British freedoms. On the way from one event to the next Jeffrey sees the first ceremonial Chinese soldier standing guard where a British soldier once stood.
It’s dripping hot and humid, and the crowd is growing more and more unruly, taunting the soldier. Jeffrey knows he’s late for his next event, and a call from his editor reinforces that. “Your car and driver are waiting for you. Please get over there now.”
“Give me ten minutes, “ he says to his editor, convincing her that what he’s witnessing could make for a symbolic photograph. While she has the driver circle, he creates another cover of Time, which runs the week after his previous cover.
“It’s often unplanned moments that make for some of the most interesting and important photographs. Sometimes you just have to follow your intuition, even if it means ignoring your editor,” Jeffrey later reflects.
Today’s post shares a slice of humor and nostalgia. Jeffrey Aaronson photographed this series along a rural highway in northern Colorado for Life magazine, stirring memories of the Old West and the cowboy tradition.
All photos ©Jeffrey Aaronson The Art of an Improbable Life 2012
PS: Sharing one of my favorite series of photographs seems like the perfect way to celebrate my 100th post today!
MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE
(1904-1971)
Margaret Bourke-White was an extraordinary photographer and a woman of many firsts. Not only was she the first female photojournalist for Life magazine and the first photographer for Fortune magazine, but she was also the first female war correspondent allowed to work in combat zones during World War II, and also the first Western photographer allowed into the Soviet Union.
Before becoming a photographer, she attended five different universities in pursuit of a degree in Herpatology (the study of reptiles), eventually receiving her degree from Cornell in 1927.
She was born in the Bronx to intense parents, Minnie Bourke and Joseph White, who believed in reading and improving the mind. They did not allow things like comic books or chewing gum. Bourke-White enjoyed photography as a hobby and had a father who supported her interest. She studied with Clarence White, a leader in the pictorial school of photography, before moving to Cleveland, Ohio to launch her career. Her first job was as an industrial photographer at the Otis Steel Mill, which brought her much acclaim.
She married twice, once at a young age, then again to writer, Erskine Caldwell, whom she collaborated with on several book projects, including You Have Seen Their Faces, documenting the depression.
“Utter truth is essential and that is what stirs me when I look through the camera”–Margaret Bourke-White
“The camera is a remarkable instrument. Saturate yourself with your subject, and the camera will all but take you by the hand and point the way.”–MBW
Margaret Bourke-White clearly made a huge mark on photography, and proved that women are just as capable as men, even in the most difficult situations.
To see additional photos by Margaret Bourke-White, click on the highlighted link. You can also check out her work on Amazon (click on this book to get started).
Here’s a list of some of the books she created:
You Have Seen Their Faces, 1937 with Erskine Caldwell
North of the Danube, 1939 with Erskine Caldwell
Shooting the Russian War, 1942
They Called it “Purple Heart Valley”, 1944
Halfway to Freedom; a report on the new India, 1949
Portrait of Myself, 1963
Dear Fatherland, rest quietly, 1946
The Taste of War (selections from her writings edited by Jonathon Silverman
FYI: I just read that Barbara Streisand is hoping to direct her first movie in 16 years–”Skinny and Cat,” a love story about Margaret Bourke-White and her late husband, writer Erskine Caldwell. You can read about it here.
See if you can NAME THAT PHOTOGRAPHER from the following five clues:
1) She was an American photographer born in 1904.
2) She was the first female war correspondent and the first female permitted to work in combat zones.
3) She created this iconic image of Gandhi at his spinning wheel.
4) She was the first Western photographer allowed to take pictures of Soviet industry.
5) She battled Parkinson’s disease for 18 years and died of it at age 67.
Leave your answer in the comment box and find out tomorrow if you are correct!